The Sum of Strange Bedfellows
All the Fair of the Unfair at the Electro Gallery.
Review by NICK PELLING and HELEN MURPHY
The title of an art exhibition can shed a little light on the intention of the artists. But some artists prefer to be more cryptic. And occasionally, deliberately bewildering. The Exhibition we struggled along to see on a windy night in West St Leonards, at the rather wonderful Electro Gallery, heralded itself under the title, All the Fair of the Unfair. Ah yes. No idea. Undaunted, we ducked in the door.
What we were, in fact, confronted with was a group show consisting of mainly local artists; this cohered only in that the chemistry of strange bedfellows can create unforeseen totalities. Like a fashion shot of a zombie model that is so stupidly grotesque and bizarre that it takes on a weird beauty just before you put the magazine in the bin.
Mark Walter is an artist whose paintings seem to emanate from some fount of dark humour, with titles that seem to hark from some ‘brothers Grimm world’ such as The Magic of Severed Hands. His work is largely abstract and is most concerned with disturbed and textured fields of paint with little surprise colour areas. We were particularly impressed with his triptych entitled Torment and the Pain Leaked Through. The mix of oil, household paint and wax gave it an overall strength of painterly personality that pulls you in and then ignores you.
Grotesque visual humour might also be said to be a trademark of Georgie Wheeler. Her work frequently plays with goggle-eyed cartoonery, but in this exhibition there was an intriguing new direction. One wall was neatly covered in little pieces, beautifully framed in matchbox frames, featuring clowns that seemed as trapped as pinned moths. The sudden shrink of scale, rather oddly, actually amplified the emotional noise of these small, brilliant artworks.
The work of Morokoth Fournier offered a shift of mood. Her work has a decorative and gentle feel, drawing deeply on her rich heritage, which combines a British and French-Cambodian sensibility. The notes of feline delicacy and dancing lines certainly set her work apart from the rest.
Moving around the gallery, after a while, felt like stepping in and out of different worlds. Chrissy McLaughlin took us neatly to what she called the Land of Maybe. Delightful acrylics, medleys of paint including the peculiarly delightful Bunny Cat.
At a most obtuse angle to all this was the work of Lucy Brennan Shiel. She is probably best known as a performance artist who has steeped her work in the endless possibilities reverberating from James Joyce’s immortal Ulysses. But here, her paintings felt more sharply cerebral and enigmatic, and maybe even meditative. Jude Montague, by extreme contrast, brought us monoprints of what she called a “motley crew of warriors,” led by a moustachioed character entitled Don Peyote, set in a mock-grand gold frame. Don stared out at the room full of culture imbibers with the look of a deranged bandit getting a bit twitchy about his revolver.
And after an hour or so of imbibing this shape-shifting exhibition, we felt something similar. But at times, it seems, derangement can be worth a wander up a windy Seaside Road.
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