art pilgrimage VyNeR StReet
Although Wilkinson feels anything but rough and ready, the rest
of the galleries continue to reflect the kind of grittiness of context that
originally put Vyner Street and its surroundings on the map. Over at
Fred, American painter Zak Smith’s works on paper (many notebook-
size and presented as a grid on the gallery walls) depict a world of
pornstars. Executed in black-and-white with something of a Tank Girl
comicbook aesthetic, Smith’s drawings and paintings take a series of
teenager’s-bedroom-style interiors occupied by punk pornstars and
the occasional Ron Jeremy and gradually merge them (as we move
from notebook to painting) into abstract splatters and more decorative
renditions – perhaps a fitting metaphor for Vyner Street chic.
Curiously, Smith’s work finds both an echo and an opposite
downstairs at One in the Other, where Justin Craun’s paintings of
innocent-looking grinning high-school kids similarly fuse notions of
portraiture, decoration and abstraction. Smith’s work finds echoes too
in that of Vancouver-based Steven Shearer at Stuart Shave/Modern
Art. Shearer’s drawings, paintings and shrine-like collages of found
images feature androgynous long-haired males (in the 1970s teen-
idol mode), most of whom look like they are bursting to be loved and
adored. Most intriguing is I Thought I Was a Visionary – But Learned I
Was a Channeler (2003), which includes an affidavit signed by the artist
and a carpenter who worked on his studio (and offered up in a pile of
photocopies on the gallery reception desk), affirming that a fragment
of The Vancouver Sun Weekend Magazine, dated 24 June 1978 and
found by the carpenter among debris behind a studio wall, was a
presence theretofore unknown to the artist, whose work Kaleidoscope
(2001), featuring a collage of Leif Garrett images, had hung on the
wall ‘approximately seven months prior’ to the discovery. Keeping it
real (and using the law if necessary), you see, is what this is all about.
(Incidentally, Stuart Shave/Modern Art is going to be moving to a
West End space.)
Round the corner at Nettie Horn (in a building that formerly
housed Vilma Gold), The Islanders offers up ten artists’ takes on David Risley, David Risley Gallery
Britishness. Although given that one of the three paintings by Guy
Allott is from his ongoing series of homemade, cartoon-like spaceships
(there’s a bit of Heath Robinson in it), the motifs of discovery and of
running off to another planet seem fused together. Meanwhile, Kirsten
Glass’s collage Whodunit? (2007) offers up a selection of wallpaper, an
eyeless model (of the makeup-advertisement variety) and some details
of various gestural paintings to suggest that everything is surface, and
identity a complete mystery.
If the Nettie Horn show subtly gives Britishness a rather liminal
status, then David Risley’s presentation of new paintings by Masakatsu
Kondo, which take bridges as their central motif, tackles liminality head
on. Kondo’s works fit neatly with Risley’s favouring of artists with almost
brutally direct approaches (Boo Ritson’s photographs of painted
bodies, Michael Simpson’s enormous paintings of benches), and stand
in complete contrast to Glasgow-based Karla Black’s show at Ibid
Projects. The latter features three sculptures that are reminiscent of
torn-down shower curtains covered in makeup and cosmetics stains,
toothpaste and paint. Whatever message they’re sending out is cryptic
at best – expressions of the roles of art and identity reduced to the
barest of means? – but you get the feeling that Kirsten Glass might
approve.
Vilma Gold, now moved to Minerva Street, just round the corner
from the Vyner Street massive, shows a new sculpture installation and a
new video installation by onetime Turner Prize-nominee Mark Titchner.
In complete contrast to Wilkinson, this new space continues to have a
sense of intimacy and familiarity. But contrast, perhaps, is what Vyner
Mark titchner, The White Lite (detail), 2007 (installation
view), Vilma Gold
Street is all about.
101 artreview
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