Atoms and Societies – all Tearable
MERLIN BETTS
So Help Me Dog
Last Saturday, a new exhibition opened at Stella Dore on Norman Road, showing work by David Oates and Yokel Graham. The gallery had its usual cast of creative characters enjoying some evening sun out the back and hoping the internet would hold out long enough to give us a lovely playlist. I was invited to take a chance on the day’s raffle, with delectable prizes served from License2Kale’s smoothie bar, and pulled myself a winning ticket for £4.50 before settling in to check out the art.
David Oates’ work immediately plugged into my off-brand scientific spiritualism. Looking down the picture titles and artists’ bios, I saw a piece, Loughton Camp, named for the place in an Essex Woodland where I spent about 15 years of my life, on-and-off, messing around, climbing trees, chattering to faeries. I looked up at the art and saw the typical hand-trees of Epping Forest – made by an old practice of lopping limbs rather than cutting down trunks. It gives many of our trees the palm and fingers, or the crown that cups all kinds of life.
Oates’ work radiates that peculiar sense of in-between – the place where thoughts and senses synthesise. Apart from pictures of perfectly half-wild scenes, he also had fish tanks whose contents seeped out seamlessly into the world around them. At times his pictures looked like blueprints, almost sterile, and then in the same moment transformed into a vivid image of the life they portrayed.
Visually the complete opposite, but thematically the same, Yokel Graham’s paintings exploded into the room. The simple, naïve or garish style and colour-palette make his scenes disarming, the way illustrations for children can oversimplify complicated ideas, make them almost numbing – but he’s included all the things that we’d like to hide. Drunks throwing up, secrets smuggled underground, a devil burning a church; and more nuanced scenes, a guard catching graffiti writers in a train yard, people sat at a cocktail bar, Snoopy as Christ. Graham’s work forces us to accept the functional chaos we see all around us and understand that this is our world, or the society we have made in it: looking whole and clear, but psychologically torn apart.
Have a look at @stelladore_gallery on Instagram and Facebook, or stop by 64 Norman Road to see Tearable, Thursday-Saturday, 11.00-17.00. Murals by Yokel Graham can also be seen around town, near the bottom of Church Road, St Leonards, and at Sturdee Place, Hastings.
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