INTERFACE
Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
REVIEW
Bad Quality
Millais Gallery, Southampton
10 January – 1 February
Reviewed by: Stephen Riley
The production of images through mechanical and digital technologies has long been associated with the pursuit of false perfection. Blemishes were first airbrushed and are now 'Photoshopped' out of existence. 'Bad Quality' explores the opposite end of these technologies; it is their limitations that interest the twelve artists whose work is drawn together in this show.
This echoes a long-standing theme in modern art, one that seeks a greater truth by trading-off technical perfection in favour of expression. And in spite of the extensive use of digital technology, there is more than a hint of nostalgia here. This point was clearly in the mind of the curator, whose statement refers affectionately to childhood memories of the lumbering early computers of the 1970s and 1980s.
The deliberate, creative degradation of images creates an equivalent to the breakdown that occurs over time through chemical decomposition or the effects of excessive recopying. Lee Maelzer's photographs are subjected to a range of chemical tortures before being reproduced as digital prints, the effect being like stumbling across the discarded, rain-damaged record of someone else's life.
CCTV images – crudely recorded then degraded through reproduction – are an inevitable inclusion. Anthony Carr's surveillance stills bring to mind a thousand television appeals for the identity of crime perpetrators, as well as Jamie Wagg's controversial 1994 adaptations of the Bulger abduction tapes.
It is the video work that is perhaps the most engaging. Theodore Tagholm takes the viewer across a room and 'through' a television screen, then 'through' another, and so on, repeatedly, until it is no longer clear what, if anything, is real.
The show's nostalgia and its celebration of the flawed, correspond with the postmodern rejection of the modernist belief in perfectibility. It is therefore poignant that the touching piece of home cine film that Niall MacDonald appropriates dates from the 1950s.
Writer detail:
DR STEPHEN RILEY
is an artist and lecturer based in the south of England
stephenriley8@hotmail.com |
www.stephenrileyart.com
Venue detail:
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