revieWs welcome to my world
Welcome to my World
Alex Andre PollAzzon ltd, london
13 July – 1 SePtem ber
trenton doyle Hancock, The Ossified
Theosophied, 2005, set of seven
etchings, 64 x 50 cm each. courtesy
Alexandre Pollazzon ltd, london
The English summer might not inspire an abundance
of holiday spirit, but London’s commercial galleries
have enjoyed their prolonged siestas anyway.
Notable are spaces that invited guest curators to
liven up the annual lull, and relative new-kid-on-
the-block Alexandre Pollazzon has proved cannier
than most by calling on the services of New York-
based curator Amy Davila and artist Matthew Day Jackson. Their response, Welcome to My World, though it comes with
exaggerated claims about straying from modernist thinking and making, and with a pamphlet of obfuscating texts, is a
concise and cohesive show of sculpture, video, sound and small-scale wall-mounted works united by a craft aesthetic, a sense
of caution when broaching political subject matter and a coating of surrealist humour.
Despite the inclusion of artists based in Texas, Berlin, LA and London, the world in question feels very much like the
Manhattan art scene, with a smattering of well-publicised up-and-comers like Adam Helms and Deborah Grant. The inkling
that we’re just getting another city’s summer group show, however, is compensated by the sense of taking an excursion. And
the work segues and knots in satisfying ways. Fabienne Lasserre’s sculpture Hairy Grey Thing (2007) – Meret Oppenheim
by way of Cousin Itt – is a more cartoonish manifestation of the hirsute beings conjured in her detailed drawings, again with
such brazenly blunt titles as Hairy Blob (2006), all suggesting a lumbering, animalistic basis of creativity. Hobbesian portent is
picked up in Adam Helms’s drawings, such as 2 NFA Irregulars (Brother’s Keeper) (2005), which features gun-toting, fur-faced
guerrillas from his fictional paramilitary group, New Frontier Army.
Like Helms’s NFA, which is inspired by images of extremists and insurgents across time and space, Deborah Grant’s
series A Gin Cure (2005) borrows from a variety of sources to offer a bad-mood board of dissent. The title of the series is
an anagram of ‘Guernica’, and along with other images of conflict in a trio of collaged silhouettes are figures from Picasso’s
famous painting – a strange, stylish gathering that, rather than add up to a continuing condemnation of war or a postmodern
rejection of meaning, appears to signal a kind of blank despair. Obvious but undeniably funny, Chip Duyck’s Colouring and
Activity Book (2005) is based on the life of Jean Genet – with highlights including a maze puzzle encouraging visitors to
‘help Jean find his client in the urinals’. Something about being made to don white gloves to handle Duyck’s publication (and
having to peel them off afterwards) makes the experience seem especially seedy. But the show has its lighter moments; Mika
Rottenberg’s 2003 film Julie, of a woman walking on her hands in a snowy landscap, inverted so that she seems to hang from
an icy ceiling, and Gitta Schaefer’s Sparta and Rima (both 2006), Brancusi-esque columns of flea market finds.
Somewhere between the apparent dangling of tired legs and the raising up of tatty totems, the show gives a glimpse,
not of a new world but of quizzical responses to the tired old one around us. When fending off the seasonal torpor of the long
wet summer, these are truly welcome. Martin Coomer
ArtrevieW 154
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