on 4 October 2002This annual touring show crystallises the latest in British art, and the current zeitgeist is reflected in a preoccupation with the threat (not the promise) lurking just below the surface of the quotidian present.
Both Darren Marshall, in acrylics, and Kieran Brown, in multimedia sculpture, make ice cream unsettling. Rob Grose’s reconstruction of a training shoe in parcel tape could be irony at the expense of branded goods, but Carol Burtt’s Sellotape humans leave no doubt that the joke’s on us. Matt O’Dell’s installation reduces the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 at Lockerbie to cardboard shapes, while, one step further on, Niall Blankley installs obsolete communications equipment in a burnt-out lorry on a junkyard, adds a swivel chair and calls it ‘Workstation’.
Yes, not even technology is sacred: Bálint Bolygó and Lesley Halliwell scribble scratchy approximations of the elegant lissajous and spirographs of computer screensavers; and Andrew Palmer paints empty Windows desktops, perhaps the ultimate contemporary expression of despair.
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