ARTICLES
EXIT REVIEW

Liverpool John Moores University


BILLAAL AHAZHARIES

I thought Warhol died ages ago and I also thought Pollock had died a lot earlier than that.
Unfortunately, Pollock's death didn't mean the end of the 'Drip' painting. Abstract expressionism is still alive and kicking and Ahazharies does a pretty good job of copying that style. Drip, drip, drip. Copying being the opposite of pastiche and irony. What was Pollock thinking when he dripped and splashed all over the canvas? Who knows. What was Ahazharies thinking? I want to do a Pollock is the answer.
Ahazharies's other paintings, a series of cosmic mutterings - three painted on garden decking and four painted on canvas - do nothing but make me think of images of Glastonbury I have seen on the telly and early eighties luminous legwarmers.
A homemade blue file sits on the floor. Entitled 'Welcome to a thousand shades of the Blues' Below the title, Ahazharies instructs us 'Must read to understand'. I must read the book to understand the work! Not, can I read it, but I must read it. Did I read it? No (at least not all 3000+ words). Should I have read it? No. I did have a look though, the opening page entitled 'The Willie Lynch Proposal' referred to a proposal by Willie Lynch - an American Slave Regulator - on how to clamp down on slaves who had fled. Slave uprisings.
What did Ahazharies's work have to do with the 'Willie Lynch Proposal' beyond what the artist was thinking of perhaps when he painted the Pollock. What did the work say about the 'Willie Lynch Proposal' if I had walked past the blue book on the floor (as I suspect many others did) and therefore could not have known anything about Willie and his Slave problem.
Would or could the work have communicated (to me) these grave matters (presumably grave in the thoughts of the artist) without the accompanying text. No, absolutely not. So why do artists try to communicate an idea, using an outdated style of painting, knowing that the only way they can really communicate is via a 'non-negotiable' compulsory text?

Apologist text for an apologist set of works.

Paul Sullivan


A rich blue space presenting first a perverted hip-hop Jackson Pollock, a confection of gold, blue and luminous green. Other paintings also use drips and splashes, the only figuration emerging in a pair of pneumatic breasts and an equally idealised penis. References in the titles to jazz and the Willie Lynch proposal. The accompanying booklet - "must read to understand" - explains the importance of the proposal in the work and includes a copy of it. It's a fascinating, horrifying tract detailing ways of breaking slaves and degrading them in order to gain optimum use of them - includes attention to breeding techniques (represented by the breasts and the penis?) and how to break the mother's natural bond with the child to establish within family relationships a continuum of the power enforced by master upon slave. It gives a powerful perspective from which to reflect on the construction of black identity, but unfortunately there is little evidence of that here. I miss the questioning and reflection necessary to make a consequent relation with the tract, and as it stands the work is in danger of being an aestheticizing escapade. Why attach a text of such weight to work which seems so disinterested in engaging with any of the issues it raises? The tract becomes an object merely of passing curiosity (what happened to critical feedback?). Jazz as a point of intersection and divergence between Pollock and black culture; it's an interesting, thought-provoking starting point which the artist needs to develop within the work - I hope he will. Some paintings are ornamental, decorative surfaces which do little more than add to the sense of a total environment, while others hybridise stereotypes and ciphers of both black and white culture in the huge black penis and the hip-hop Pollock. Despite the problems I have to appreciate the energy in this space and the sense that although it is by no means worked out the artist has found something of real interest to develop - the job now is to address the relations he has just begun to sketch out.

Imogen Stidworthy

CHRISTINA BABER

On entering Christina Baber's meticulous reconstruction of a domestic interior, it is the sound of a ticking clock that immediately transports you back to those Sunday afternoon visits to your Gran's house where time seemed to stand still. Except that here there is no elderly relative to greet you with a cup of tea, piece of cake and her reminiscences. Something is not quite right. A half eaten biscuit on a plate, a half drunk glass of sherry, knitting left abandoned on a chair - and what's inside the wall cupboard whose door is ominously wedged shut by a strategically placed broom handle? Clues to the room's inhabitant are evident. A postcard addressed to Nana pokes out from behind the water heater. She is a Royalist, judging by her magazine reading matter left open on the table. But more than that we can only surmise, and it is this uncertainty of meaning, this open-endedness that makes this more than simply a competent set design, but a poignant environment, an affectionate tribute to the life, and perhaps loss, of an acquaintance real or imagined.

Bryan Biggs


Walter Benjamin spoke of the bourgeois interior as one of casings in which its inhabitants leave tracings of their existence and use. The interior of Baber's installation may lack the velvet surfaces of the Victorian home, but it offers the viewer a collection of traces from which the absence of its resident is strongly felt and a narrative of events is suggested.

"The smell of old people," another visitor to the space commented. Our setting is a grandmother's home, convincingly created-the royal family paraphernalia, sentimental tchokes, including an "I Love You Grandma" plaque-the décor indicates a personality, what turns this interior into a theater are its clues of the events our characters have endured. "What happened" is represented through a knocked over teacup and half-eaten biscuits, a partially smoked cigar in the ashtray and empty wine glasses, shoes, knitting left out-- the signs of disorder are those of human presence, of being left-in-the-middle-of something, of disruption. [The final action is a broom pushed up against a short door (more on that later).]

If we enter this space as a criminal, breaking into someone's privacy, we soon become the detective-we are presented with the clues and must read its features-to envision absence. The crime scene is a contemporary space-a place full of evidence, of traces or something happened which can be read-we read a place to learn about what is not there or already gone. Evidence is always connected to something else, its cause, and is an indication of something else.

What do we think of "setting" as art-of verisimilitude? The context and its artificiality makes this into theater, and our sense of our own presence is heightened

When I first entered this room, it was quiet-it was only the next day that a voice cried for help from behind the small door. It was disturbing, and added a bit of black humor to the piece. But in bringing the event into the present-we understand what has happened and now we see its sinister intent--the voice becomes a sort of punchline-it all adds up to being trapped in the closet. I felt it made too much sense of it all, locked the space into a certain reading, when I much preferred playing Sherlock.

Joanna Spitzner

All together, there are suggested relations, but it often feels like just a hodge-podge of whatever the artist felt like making that day. The car door offers one reading, that of traveling, an absorption of the world through looking out the moving window. There's a trip through art history-constructivism, landscape, souvenirs, symbols-guns, cans, the endangered human being. It reminds me of clip art: a variety of illustrations in a limited range of styles-pick and choose. The most pronounced difference is a painting of an atomic bomb explosion-an image with an overpowering meaning and a stereotype of the fragility of man.

There is much joy in this work, Beck obviously loves to paint and draw. The use of tape as paint (the application of color), the engraving of line into the wood seem to be extending traditional vocabularies. But the technique, form, and concept don't seem to sit well together in these works and the strongest elements are left bare as technique only.

Carved lines in wood could engage in the breakdown of surface and flatness of a panel, announce its objectness; or transform something ephemeral like a doodle into permanence, written in stone, thereby recalling its initial temporary nature. Wood and its pattern, decoration, fields of color-does it matter here whether its subject is a thinking man or a tin can? It doesn't. And this gives the work a generic quality. Without the conversation among its relationships, we are left with arbitrariness.

Joanna Spitzner

Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Oliver

What is so intriguing about your work is your eclectic use of media. You hint at archaic symbols and meaning, while constantly grounding yourself in white culture. Your appropriation of traditional artifacts seems both irreverent, intellectual and philistine. Could this be a commentary on British (mis) understanding of other cultures? or your own indulgence in playing around with as much stuff as possible? The work seems incredibly aware and self-mocking. You parody the image of the white man and paint cans and trash on top of your woodcarvings. This is extremely chaotic - but the funny thing is that its not. You've selected extremely carefully how you exhibit each object and there's a slickness which is not far from advertising techniques. Perhaps this adds to your commentary on how our culture is simultaneously influenced and overtly influential. This work verges on bigotry, on visual overload but conveys a current confusion and contradiction that is prevalent in society. It alludes to our desire to get away, to experience other cultures. It alludes to our fear of them and of our need to own everything. It is extremely flippant, but somehow it works.

Pippa

4M x 3M white room, one blank wall to the left as you walk in, three walls with things on.
Three walls with different things on, although we may assume that they are variations on a theme. The theme being drawing.
Wall 1, directly opposite you as you walk in, houses two 400mm x 300mm x 45mm (approx) solid flat white plaster reliefs entitled UNTITLEDS. On the surface of each relief is a series of marks drawn with a pencil and a series of scratches and puncture marks. It is difficult to describe what these lines are beyond the fact that they seem chaotic. They give the impression they are tracing the movement of something, trajectories, which in turn create intersections where lines meet and mini charcoal explosions take place. Maybe it's a dog- fight. Maybe it's a series of doodles.
Wall 2 contains one large drawing which fills the whole wall. Variations on wall 1
Wall 3 contains two pieces of graph paper entitled CONTINENTS, two vertical lines, two horizontal lines on one; one vertical line and one horizontal line on the other.
Unlike James Tyrell who may show us his drawings on graph paper in order to show that his light installations could not have been worked out without the aid of orthographic projection, Bennett's two drawings act as nothing more than wall fillers. They don't have any part in the process as a whole unless we suspend disbelief and imagine that the drawings are somehow part of a process that created the trajectories in the other drawings or the layout of the installation itself, but this would have to be a very, very long suspension indeed.

Why therefore, is Bennett showing us these three pieces? The answer is that he regards them as having some relationship to each other beyond the fact that they are in the same room.
Although we may subtract the graph drawings from this equation, we may regard the two 'UNTITLEDS' not as sketches for the main wall piece - as they are presented as finished works - but rather as smaller scale postures, prior to the larger wall piece and therefore directly related. We may imagine that the artist has photographed UNTITLEDS - projected the results onto main wall and drawn over the lines of a particular section - such is the likeness of the drawing techniques in both. The only difference being one of scale. Large wall piece has larger lines, thicker lines and lines drawn with what seems to be a homemade spirograph or, as we used to do when we were kids, tape three pencils together and away you go.
Bennett's drawings are abstract. They hint at things beyond or behind and have a spatial depth. They work well as simplistic contrasts between white background and monochrome everything else but beyond that, they offer little more than the hope that next time we may come away from the white cube with more than a sense of what could have been.

Paul Sullivan

How do we judge a quality of mark-lightness or force of hand, the operations of gesture: the residue of an action, of contact between things. There is control, lack of control, the familiarity and at the same time strangeness of our own bodies. How does the body move and what traces does it leave? My hand was here.

Bennett's scribbles are of sharp angles, then softened with smudges-the finger dulls the mechanical point; there is repetition and movement. His marks become architecture-constructed spaces. In the small white cube of his exhibition, we are given three scales: 2 head-sized plaster panels, a wall, and slightly marked graph paper labeled "Continents."

Scale and density are the problems of this work. The smaller works are interesting for the fields of smokey space and markings it presents; and while the wall offers the possibility of this experience of field. It is instead a web of tread marks to drive us across the wall. We can't really enter either of these.

The pretty marks seem to say "I exist," but I can't engage in this work beyond just admiring some fancy doodling.

Joanna Spitzner

ANNA BENSON

Jumping horses is a dangerous game, but not as dangerous as painting them. Horse paintings carry some combination of the following references: posh people, weird sex, childhood dreams unfulfilled. It's easy to unintentionally press the wrong buttons.

Benson's work falls squarely into the third category. Her paintings of horse jumpers and racers in action, on the verge of triumph and disaster, were torn from the sports pages and rendered in a fluorescent, geometric style that brings to mind a 1980s child's sticker album. The thin line between glory and agony is a very real concern in this work, leaving the viewer with a hint of tragedy (real or imagined) in the artist's past.

Michael Connor, FACT

Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Anna

You use bright happy colours in your paintings and simple bold designs. These are reminiscent of advertising graphics. They could be just this, but somehow you transcend the merely fashionable by the accident scenes, which look suspiciously finalistic. Your theme is horse racing, and in your four large paintings you show us different stages of the Jockey being thrown from the horse. The Jockey is always in movement, while the horses often appear secondary, like heavy loaves, squashed out of shape - or even wiped out. Your use of colour and pattern conveys the impact of these falls. The canvases are broken down in to rectangular forms of colour. These are employed in different manners, but always overlap at some stage with the central image, altering it's colour in accordance with colour theory rules. As the accidents become more dramatic, so does the cutting up of the image with rectangular forms. The careful placing of these shapes affects how the drama is played out. In this sense you deal with the age-old subject of mortality, while escaping heavy referencing.

Pippa

The most dramatic work entails walking down a dark corridor-space encroaches onto the body without sight, we are unsure of our steps. Relief then comes with the restoration of sight: a window, an illuminated diorama of exaggerated perspective, another corridor, of immaterial thread, an illustration of a constructed perception of space.

The most interesting aspects of this work are the play between the optical and the body, and this is fairly straightforward. Is the subtle drama worth it? There is a buildup to the punchline-ours senses are shifted and then restored in a fairly quick amount of time. The use of color seems to be about some sort of purity, or blankness.

Joanna Spitzner



Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Dave

Although your work was rooted in the concept of the white cube, it made me think outside of it. My mind drifted to the standardization of much town planning and cheap housing, to modular structures that are increasingly apparent physically and bureaucratically in everyday life. I am not convinced that you recognized the potential your work could have in expressing these wider themes. One problem was that your exploration of space seemed pretty standardized itself.

You deconstructed your studio/exhibition space, which was within the modular structure of a pre-fab. All well and good, contextually, but the structures you made didn't make the work your own. My mind wanders to the question of individuality and originality. What should the artist now strive for when everything has apparently already been done? It seems that this work is the encompassing of the artist within the greater scheme of things. Is this unawares? Your concern appears to be with the audiences' experience of the space, your tactic is to make the white cube become the artwork in itself. This has many precedents, so how you execute it is vitally important to the integrity of the work. You juxtapose a large white space with a narrow black tunnel. For me, the tunnel is the most interesting part of the work. It plays on expectation, anticipation and fear. It is a build up to an anti-climax, turning the corner I experience a small screen of light, in the place of whatever I feared. It is itself a continuation of the tunnel, an exercise in perspective and architectural space. This is where I see the potential of your work. Through playing with space and the audiences' experiences, you can challenge, subvert and play with the expectations of the viewer. So far your methods have been fairly straightforward and unsurprising, but there is so much scope - don't leave it with the white cubes.

Pippa

DOUG BLACKMORE

Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Doug

'Architectural Space with Yellow Ladder and Blue Tree' is an immediate impact work that is just what the title says it is. Large scale objects, a ladder, a tree and a cube like frame interact with each other to form their own sculptural space. On the one hand this work can be seen as a commentary, a criticism of modern life, on the other it becomes a meditative piece. The simplicity of the form presents a purity of space, which allows the mind to wander. The scale of the work swallows up the viewer, raising questions about themselves in relation to the larger scheme of things. This is a very grand experience, and I wonder is it too grand? On first encounter, I had to stand there and take it in for a while. The scale and the confident forms confused my senses. I felt bombarded by this work; such was its scale and simplicity of execution. Your use of a large painted tree, disguised as a manufactured object opened up reference points to man and nature. I was impressed by your reference points for this piece, which made it more sophisticated than much spatial exploration. Your interest in Japanese Edo Architecture perhaps suggested the alienation from the outside world of much art, or was perhaps a homage to a more holistic way of working. You wrote about the 'mundane made iconic' but I couldn't help feeling that your style was falling into a current trend and that although it was reminiscent of showrooms and marketed lifestyles it was too close to be a proper critique. I wondered if there were other more ambiguous ways to explore the connotations of the white cube. Such over-stylised work reminds me of the MacDonaldisation (or Swiss-Lifeisation) of society.

Pippa

Vacant room at time of visit - Beuys at Ronald Feldman … What can you say?

Paul Domelar

Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Catherine

I found your works sensitive and serious; an attempt to explore where you as a painter could go without the canvas. It was one small step, that could be followed up with a great deal more. You used paint indirectly to provide the visual effects. Red, Green and Yellow were painted on the back of dark blue and white wood cut outs exhibited slightly removed from the wall. As the light in the room changed, green, red and yellow shadows appeared on walls. As the viewer walked, or the light altered these patterns would become stronger or alter shape. It was an exploration of 'reflective properties' and a way of allowing the viewer to experience the transition of 'cool' colour to 'warm' colour. I am reminded of cut out exercise school children do and of DIY craft structures, however this is not really about cultural connotations but an exploration of form. Your forms were that bit too simple, and there was movement, but not enough. You chose a standard scale, where you could have experimented with the over powering or the almost invisible. This one small step was intriguing, but too small to be of an any great resonance.

Pippa

AlYSON COCKER

'Fashion as torture', the cruelty of the ideal body and the media's construction of it. Strong themes are cited through the subjects of sexual games, role-play, body modification. Exhibits are placed on mannequins and wall-hung in a rather musealogical manner, but they reference rather than explore a range of themes. Presenting found and fabricated objects with no sense of questioning beyond the first impression, in terms of languages of representation, for example, gender politics, the artists own experience…etc.
The photographs of herself and friends in sexual poses and clothes seem the most motivated element in the work; the artist seems to have engaged,
perhaps she feels more connected with her material, or just enjoyed playing. Either way the images do touch on something of the way the bodily codes of pornography have filtered through to and become embedded in even the most anodyne levels of fashion shoot and advertisement, even to the language of our daily bodily habits. A potentially interesting avenue to explore, but what we see in the installation is again only a starting point with little consideration of the quality of the image or even the manner of presenting it. The work needs so much more attention, even to convince me of the artist's own interest in what she is doing. She needs to look critically at the context within which her work is made - better still define it. In terms of art that might be the work of Ron Athey, Catherine Opie (interestingly, both working with gay politics) Bob Flannegan or even Vanessa Beecroft, and ask herself what she is aiming for in her own. Women's corsets are now a historical fact rather than a contemporary problem, an all too easy short-cut code for a certain outmoded feminist critique; despite this there is something fascinating about the description of the sensations of wearing a corset for twenty minutes. The very perversity of volunteering to be so constricted in itself gives pause for thought; I could see this being drawn out into an interesting investigation of the ambiguities and contradictions of our sexualised selves.

Imogen Stidworthy

As a heterosexual male subject I find myself drawn to the fully dressed porn poses. This could be a new genre! One of the few artists who works with photography and the only one with a working video. I like these fully dressed porn poses with their bland, disinterested slightly disdainful expressions. The akward roleplay is amusing especially considering how fem-dom has been played out in the gay scene - I am reminded of the photographs of CatherineOpie. At present the work reflects the confusions of adolescence - more than the politics of gender. However, there is still space between Catherine Opie and Martha Rosler. It is again in the photographs that the marks of the corset leave their lasting impression - here the work renders desire and the strictures of fantasy models most succesfully.

Paul Domelar

MATTHEW COLLETT

This is a sparse installation, two video monitors on plinths confronting the visitor on entering the room. I can only describe it thus, as the videos on first encounter seemed to offer little more. Neither is there any contextual clue, a title or text, or if there was I was unable to access it as the room was closed on the two occasions I returned after the exhibition opening. Sorry Matthew.

Bryan Biggs

Was clearing out his space….No comment.

Paul Domelar

MICHAEL DAINTY

I have to admire Michael Dainty's approach of putting as much work in his show as possible, presumably in the belief that something will stick. There is even a hidden assemblage beneath the tits and prick table piece. Unfortunately the disparate elements do not seem to connect, and the installation only serves to confuse, which is a pity, as there is some informed thinking going on here. In Echo and Narcissus, the vernacular African technique of recycling aluminium drinks cans into decorative and functional objects is put to good effect, moulded by Dainty over a mannequin that hovers above a floor strewn with other discarded booze cans. A comment on the environment, consumerism, lad culture perhaps. Elsewhere a scattering of shoes and sea shells does little to articulate its title, Proof of Existence, and the video piece is just too close to Gillian Wearing for comfort. In a final piece, men's suits and ties line the wall, each captioned with a one-word description of the imagined wearer. But if you are going to use text to critique male power, please show you are smarter than your target by checking your spelling, which here scored nul points.

Bryan Biggs

RICHARD DEANE

Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Richard

On first entering your space it left me cold. You'd pared down your work to the absolute minimum. A computer animation that aesthetically resembled the early Amiga games. Although there was no code, in the simplicity of forms and lines your works made me think of computer programmes, of a simulated life, of IQ tests, of the naïvest forms of science fiction ideology where the computer could be everything.

In many ways I found myself thinking that this is a brave work because it gives very little to the viewer, and seems to ask very little in return. It denies colour, texture and any apparent concept, focusing on the illusions created by playing with the forms of simple structures. And yet I also wondered whether this was really art and not simply designs for screensavers - now that could be a concept to build on!

In this sense I wonder how free you really are in your use of technology. Is the work mediated by the limitations of the programmes you use? Is your use of technology a way of avoiding wider questions and experimentation with what art could be? It seemed to me that you had reached an impasse where you doubted that art could hold any meaning. You were hiding yourself in the simplest forms. You refer to M C Escher and his use of geometrical forms, of the 'impossible triangle', of illusion and of disorientation, but Escher's work was highly mathematical, extremely intricate and followed through ideas obsessively. You are dealing with the bare necessities. And in this it seemed extremely unevolved. Challenge yourself.

Pippa

The only artist in the entire school who works with a computer. I liked these silent axiometric drawings, their understanding of the weight of a line and the weight of a surface rendered digitally. Julian Opie meets Escher. The different permutations coming out of a sustained attention to mathematical optical impossiblities gives this work a quiet precision. Can grey be joyous? This work touches upon the problem of making a studious drawing blossom in the digital age. Under the dictatorship of the mouse a visual matheme leapfrogs as an incongruous algorithm. There was a twitch in the screensaver, its continuous loop revealing my eye in a flash to be still entirely conditioned by the stop-rewind and play of a magnetic mechanics. For a school so dominated by an unquestioned attachment to painting this move to technology may be seen as radical.

Paul Domelar

Central to his laboratory is a cardboard machine which fills and dominates the space, The Drawing Machine: The Homme System and the No Circle System. This is a sample from Jack O' the Clock Machinery, Ltd, producer of the generic machine-an arcade video game-like box-(video games: the machines where fantasy worlds are promised) which, although out of order, it seems to spit out its calculations into a trash bin

The work brings out some points of experience around the machine-technology can often be baffling, we really don't see what it going on under its outer box. Dolan's work alludes to this hiddeness of equipment. One drawing alludes to Klempean's chess player, a machine that traveled around and astounded Europe, defeating anyone it played in chess. Was it a mechanical marvel or a hoax? Or like Dolan's machines, a generic box from which something is produced by a hidden operator inside?

There is a possibility of critique of our relationship to and dream of technology, of meaningless manufacture, of the idea of progress itself in this room. The pathos and befuddlement dominates this work and that persona dulls its potential of critique of systems while maintaining gadget love.

Joanna Spitzner

A series of self-portraits (presumably self-portraits) that seem unhappy and perhaps autobiographical. The commonality in the paintings, the artists language that threads the pieces together, is the way in which Ellis divides the face into a sum of requisite tones. In only one painting are these tones (territories) blurred and therefore it looks like many other self-portraits, lifelike, understandable. The rest of the paintings exaggerate the division of tones or forms in the face by highlighting their edges, their boundaries, with dark black brushstrokes.
The lines do not follow anatomical muscle or nerve formations below the surface nor do they represent vein structures, therefore we must presume they are superficial aesthetic considerations, ensuring the face is transformed from having one skin tone to a series of harsh separate tones, each fixed by borders. Borders that put me in mind of looking at farm fields from an aeroplane, one landmass carved up into hundreds of demarcation zones.

Ellis's style is not new but does convey something, if not a lot, of the artist's current psychological state beyond the surface of the image.

Paul Sullivan

A set of (self?) portraits, painted and pastel drawn. There is a sense of discomfort with figuration, an anxiety around finding another way of treating the figure. In two works the face is erased to leave a whitish, nebulous blur, but this seems more a response to a problem than propelled by an idea. In other works the face is heavily modelled with thick black lines as though the brush is holding onto and reinscribing the contours of a known object, safe but not loved. The sketch books re-enforce the sense that while the paintings and drawings are naturastically figurative the artist is looking for a conceptual frame which can take her elsewhere. One painting stands out which seems to touch on the problem shows an eyeless and uncertain figure caught between the picture plane of what appears to be an abstract modernist painting behind it, and the surface of this work itself.

Imogen Stidworthy

TIM ELLIS

This is an assured, well crafted show of ironic re-workings of modernist painting, that appear to reference in particular 60s Pop and hard edge abstraction. There are echoes here of one of the best (and still underrated) artists associated with the Pop years, Øyvind Fahlström, unfortunately without any of the Swede's political bite. And here lies the problem. Ellis's work, like a lot of current art made for and within the limitations of the white cube, revel knowingly in consumer culture's vacuity, rather than critiquing it in anything more than a joking fashion. Nonetheless these are clever paintings, the by now somewhat customary use of gloss paint and computer graphics not withstanding. No distance left to run is a worthy winner of the Swiss Life prize, helped no doubt by Elis's subliminal inclusion of a red cross amongst the plethora of stickers adorning the surface. How to be a good artist, however falls short of its intended irony by misspelling a couple of the words of advice, but maybe this too was intentional dumbing down: yes, the successful artist doesn't need to be able to spell either! The most intriguing work is not a painting at all, but an architectural model, Construction No 6, easily missed tucked around a corner beneath a fire alarm. It suggests a different direction from that of the paintings with their easy seduction.

Bryan Biggs


Tim Ellis appears to have had enormous fun in his studio. In the early 1990's Broderbund brought out the KidPix software that allowed you to 'draw' sweeping lines comprised totally of little icons, logos and bleeps. Ellis' work offers a similar playfulness. But this of course has political overtones if you follow that everything one does (as an artist) has somewhere down the line a logo or brand attached to it. The art shops on Bold Street and Slater Street have become logo-friendly and Ellis' work has the potential to deal with these subtle issues of creativity. The fear is that, as on the opening night he could not really remember why he called one piece Sertonin, or what it meant exactly (when people were genuinely interested), the opportunities may slip him by. And as with many JMU students, the decision to throw in a red herring or black sheep (in this case Mama's Boy) is not clever or enlightening, just highly irritating.

Alan Dunn, Superchannel Programme Manager at FACT

HEATHER GARDINER

There is conceptual currency in the in-between, the hover and wobble, all belong to a popular idiom of indiscrimate uncertainty. The four pieces of work are audacious probings of this semantic limboland sought in various material improbabilities that are succesfull when the suggestion of functionality of form collapses with material uselessness. This is why the muslin chair works so well as a non-chair but the table never raises the issue of table. Instead the question gets lost here in poetic sentimentatilty echoed by the liitle muslin dress draped on one of two boxes. Perhaps the juxtaposition with an object of useless functionality but material form would begin to bring out more subtlely the political resonances of the important work on difference in the production of meaning.

Paul Domelar

DAVID HERON

It was a mistake to include Tiger Man, a painting portraying Elvis and a tiger that told us nothing new about either cool cats or big cats, and showed David Heron's limitations as a realist painter. The rest of the show however, comprising a series of more recent flag paintings, has more potential to engage, in spite of an apparent simplicity. The paintings contain emblematic elements that we associate with national flags: repeated motifs, geometric ordering of space, flat areas of colour, but Heron appears to want us to engage with these images on different levels. Formally, the integration of textured wallpapers into the composition goes beyond mere decoration. Eastern Flag No 1 for instance, with its bands of fake brick wall, green (Islamic?) stars and vertical bars suggestive of barriers or imprisonment, could be read as a reference to the current political situation in the Middle East, especially when set against Western Flag No 1. Here, though, it all gets a bit ideologically muddy, as this painting introduces painted textures and pasted on paper strips and lacks the tension of its companion piece. Considering the pertinence still of Jasper Johns' flag paintings, or John Moores graduate Bashir Makhoul's re-workings on canvas of the Palestinian flag, I sense there's so much further that Heron could go with this work.

Bryan Biggs


David Heron paints the edges of his canvases. He continues the flat motifs over the edges of the square fields, across the borders, leaving behind the flat plane of the painting that books reproduce and moving into the more three-dimensional 'painting as object' field. His work refers to territories - flags (or flag-like emblems), fake bricks (real wallpaper) - without deciding which side of the fence to sit on. Is he advocating borderless relations or accepting that two diverse surfaces can live in harmony next to each other? Edge to edge. The suite of three canvases raises interesting questions, with the only disappointment being the decision to include Tiger Man (the tiger and Elvis piece) which served not to offset but rather to upset some of the other ideas that have the potential to go somewhere.

Alan Dunn, Superchannel Programme Manager at FACT

RACHEL HOLLAND

Painting as architecture and construction, the paint surface attacked and peeled away so that the image emerges not in what is applied but what is removed, to reveal the surface of an underlying structure. In one piece perspective is used cleverly to deceive the eye as it looks through a series of holes cut through layers of wooden plates. The scale and structure suggests an architectural model but it is treated as a painting, and this painterly surface is unconvincing; it seems incidental, an afterthought or unnecesssary embellishment. It suggests that the artist should be both more critical and give herself more freedom in developing her ideas, which in some cases would mean leaving painting out of the picture. In 'Shape by Pressure of a Sharp Edge', the most convincing work of the three, what is cut away folds back on itself and builds another image-layer like foliage, or the wallpaper in Clare Bertola's 'If Walls Could Talk' at Further Up in the Air - the resemblance is so striking it's unavoidable. Perhaps that work functioned as a vehicle by which this artist found her method.

Imogen Stidworthy

It is late and its getting harder to stay fresh and constructive. Perhaps I best approach this work with amnesia. Forgetting the work of Frank Stella, Lucio Fontana and more recently Catherine Bertola around the corner in Sheil Close. For how else to consider these escapes from the surface? Escapes which revisit well-rehearsed problems. Tonight I count this as laziness. Pick up the thread of art history and the work unravels at the seams. Why do something again which has been done better before? I look for the 'learning contract' which is nowhere in sight. In my notebook I jotted the long titles with a large question mark.

Paul Domelar

GARETH HOUGHTON

Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Gareth

I was talking in the pub the other day, about art and activism and the difficulty of maintaining artistic integrity or quality when the two cross over. I didn't come to any conclusions but it seems that while artists move on to new methods and new meanings so do 'good' activists. All the rest fall into didacticism and preaching or merely don't get past the expected action which the art audience or the 'enemy' has already budgeted for. Of course, I'm not saying your work is activism. It's, rather, a form of social commentary. In many ways the same concerns still apply. I get the feeling you've partly considered this debate. A range of fairly different works are on display. Different tactics. Different results? 'The Death Star', a large scale triptych, a painterly desecration of the American flag. Another work with blood running up walls that go on forever. Subtlety is not in question here. In another room you have appropriated war photographs. In each one, there is a simple alteration, a child, a corpse, a soldier become anonimised by taking on the pattern of the British or American Flags. At times the work runs too far into the didactic at others it conveys a striking and considered use of imagery. Some of your stronger works are distressing. You over dramatize - but perhaps you have to? We've been that desensitized to such imagery. I can't help feeling that however noble the intention, the works are in the wrong context and cannot avoid stereotyping. In an art school situation where you are preaching to the converted, more subtlety might be more poignant. I wonder, though, whether as interventions, placards or advertisements outdoors they would manage to do more than preach?

Pippa

Struck by the momentum and engagement one feels in the work and a sense of the proliferation of images, many incorporating the Macdonalds 'M' like a spreading virus. 'M', Hitler, Bush, Blair, Ronald Macdonald etc. are collaged into contexts which force a political and critical reading in work which evokes at times the work of John Heartfield, or in the case of 'M', the recent Chapman Brothers installation of M-infected an onslaught of too many truisms and reductive analogies. The graphic quality and the technical facility of some of the work is good, but I'm looking for something I don't already know and I don't find it. The work is in danger of reproducing rather than mimicking the glib truisms of the gutter press, advertising images and other forms of political propaganda which it seeks to pastiche.
There's a need here to fall out of love with one-liners, and start to question their underlying assumptions.
Hitler is everywhere. In the felt Hitler doll there's a tension between the toy-language of its making and the historical/political complexity of the figure it represents. The dramatically simple installation gives it impact. But the question is: why Hitler, and if it has to be Hitler, how to develop a meaning beyond the cipher we already know; beyond the simplistic equation Macdonalds/Blair/Bush=Hitler/fascism/evil manipulator.
I find a photocopied page from a chapter called 'Fighting Terrorism: the Private Sector', and pause for thought for the first time. Guidelines for soldiers about how to conduct yourself when taken hostage by terrorists, followed by three tips for inflicting pain, injury or death with blows to the throat and back of the neck. The violence in these pragmatic instructions gives a disturbing insight into the military mind-set. Would have liked to see this worked with.
Sometimes technical questions lead the artist into territory he doesn't already know, with interesting results. In a sketch-book, tests for block-printing tiny soldiers onto walls play with double impression in two colours. Photographs of the soldiers in installation swarming across walls and around architectural details, bring back the virus metaphor in other ways, give a sense of blurred vision, something not quite right with one's way of seeing.

Imogen Stidworthy

Calvin Klein is such a strong brand it would even succeed in rebranding Hitler. This is the problem with the work it takes on themes with a beligerent self-rightuousness safely stating the politically obvious. John Heartfield was working in the Thirties. Hans Haacke produced his British Leyland series in the Seventies. This is naïve Adbusters gone bad, and its oppositional politics is just as unsubtle as George W. Bush's new world order. I commend the fact that one artist at JMU ventures political opinion but in its naivity I suspect a lack of critical support. In chosing didactic oppositionality the work reinforces the dominant order it seeks to subvert, for it preaches rather than teaches and in so doing exposes nothing that might liberate the imagination. When does an image really become dangerous?

Paul Domelar

MATTHEW JAMES

Tiny, swarming plasticine figures in a glass vitrine. 'Yesterdays News': the accumulated density of many layers form something which associates with the cross-section of a garbage heap, a wave moving from front to back of the vitrine and compressing as it meets the back panel. The figures are arranged precisely, falling into disarray only in certain zones. Shifts in group movement analysed and described: on the slope, the order of a religious or fascistic rally; on the level, something of a rock concert; where the two meet, the ragged eruptions of a political protest where panic threatens stampede. The work is so simple, but very evocative. Has something of Michal Rovner's new video work at the Venice Biennale, where animated and similarly reduced tiny figures shift through modes of mass movement - but this is seen in the context of Israel's situation. Here in Liverpool the figures seem caught in a relentless tectonic process of becoming and absorbtion or erasure within the crowd. Something of Anthony Gormley and Keith Haring in the 'everyman' character of the modelling and the primary colours.
The floor piece 'Same Planet Different Worlds' doesn't work for me; this work needs a phenomenological quality which, when it happens, comes through hitting the right density and scale - or by its very singularity. Nothing in between does it yet. The smaller pieces are awkward and cute as models, losing that tension between the narrative, the formal and the material which works so well in 'Yesterdays News'. They would work well as drawings or etchings. '(help)' is an exception; the strength of focus on the figure achieved by its scale and the height of the plinth is reenforced by the circle it is drawing around it, pulling all my attention to this tiny and very solitary figure.

Imogen Stidworthy

Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Chelsea

I really like your images, your icon. It was an instant reaction. The paintings were so simple, so repetitive and yet there was so much in there. At first my mind turned to the visual connotations of nature, forests and tree stumps. Your paintings could be a depiction of the pine forests, grown purely to be chopped down. Man generally controls nature, it is rare that we see a real wilderness. So the forests, or even potential aliens, in your work 'Is this an invasion' poignantly refer to mass destruction, while also being ambiguous enough through their constant repetition. I like the way you take on the idea of such images as wallpaper, pre-empting the criticism that that is what much 2D work now is.

Your enclosed space didn't work though. It seemed too traditional a manner of enclosing the audience member within the space, within the image. It felt as if it was just a device, as if you hadn't really explored the wider possibilities for use of space and containment. The scale didn't feel right and I certainly didn't feel overwhelmed by your icons. A deeper consideration of dramatic situations was needed.

One would usually imagine that an artist creating their own icon, would do so in the guise of activist, hactivist or as an ironic conceptual commentary. What was so refreshing about this work, was that it wasn't aiming to be clever, it was sincerely, obsessively taking an idea, a motif as far as it could. It was looking at the icon in terms of an exploration of visual rather than sociological experience. I liked the ambiguity that allowed the idea of an Icon to not be the sole reading of the works. I could argue, that in many ways it was not clear enough. I'd have merely thought it a take on landscape painting, if I hadn't read your statement. - But I like your approach of infiltration rather than gimmickry. This is a work that should be developed further.

Pippa

DANIEL (DANNY) JOHN

There is something immediately attractive about the work, in that it is
colourful and sensual, while also promising a bold image which might mean
something. Staying with the making of the work, the fact that the image is
constructed by drawing (rather than photo-emulsion, stencil etc) is engaging
- it slows the viewer down to the speed of drawing rather than making the
snap decisions of mechanical reproduction. The layered nature of the colour,
the translucency of the glazing, and (in some of the works) the objectness
of the support (standing off the wall, with contrasted colour on the edge)
all also act to slow down viewing. In my book, slow viewing is the key to
viewer satisfaction.

Individual works:
If the subject is the aestheticisation of war, then F4 is the most
successful image, contrasting light, airy colour with a spiky, aggressive
image. B29 is too close to Rasta colours (or not close enough). CNN fits
very uneasily into the format, and both SKY and B29 area bit clumsy and
indistinct.

St George I found uninteresting both as concept and object, especially as
compared with those in which the edge of the support gives solidity to the
object. Missed was my favourite of the lot, showing evidence of time spent,
struggle, thought, unresolved conflicts, something a bit more personal than
war, and beautiful as well in a reduced kind of a way.

Lewis Biggs


Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Danny

From far away, your canvases look neatly painted, like the plethora of colour theory inspired works that appear in this exhibition. I am reminded of rainbows, but also of confusion. Some of the colours you use are harsher, Black, Red, Blue, Yellow. Somehow these colours don't sit comfortably together, making the painting bristle. This use of colour provokes a visually unpleasant experience, adding to the content of your work and positioning your paintings away from the kitschy, childlike, pop culture use of colour that appears to be so fashionable.

You splatter/drip paint onto the canvas in vertical lines. four different colours to each painting. I can see the pencil lines. I like the way you allow rough elements to remain in the image. Some of your paint spatters are transparent. There appear to be a randomness to how it has hit the canvas, and yet a carefully controlled image hovers on each canvas. In places you have increased the splatters so that a form, that of an aeroplane appears to surface in the middle of the image. Your titles give your work a context; CNN, SKY, B29, F4. I think of bomber planes, of television of the news channels and it strikes me that your use of colour and vertical lines is an allusion to television test cards and the way much visual information now appears to us. Within the context of the recent war, which was so far removed from us, your work gains a political dimension - but this is subtle, allowing your paintings to work on a visual, textural and contextual level.

Pippa

ELIZABETH KEARNEY

I enjoyed the feel of the room, the orderliness, the sense that someone had
taken care of it in every detail from the worktop to the labels on the jars
of jam to the curtains at the window. The home-made 1950s feel of it, making
do and getting by. I liked the skirts on the work surface repeating the
fabric of the window curtains and inviting me to peep behind. I liked the
white oven and white TV set all properly white.

I quite liked the pile of tarts on the worktop, and the Queen of tarts
printed labels on the jam jars. I got a bit lost with the green and red
theme, such crude, bland, plain colours, blunt like Christmas, but why
Christmas? Is it a celebration? Look how clever I am to make tarts? Or are
the tarts part of celebrating something else? The whirling skirt (more red
and green, not lively colours but heavy) is celebrating what?

Cooking makes me feel good too, but I don't need to make art about it. A
nice bit of music on the sound track, but you usually know there is
something lacking in the art if you have to rely on the good nostalgia of
old music to bring it all together ..I just felt I was missing something. So
far, so good, but so what?

Lewis Biggs

EVONNE KEELER

Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Evonne,

There is something incredibly erotic about your works, they have the morbidity of an Angela Carter story, but miss out on her subtle hues of meaning, perversion and détournement. Your works scream out 'Women are Victims' and in this they fail horribly. They appear intensely personal, perhaps more so than you intended. For all the fragility of your pieces there is a didacticism that shatters the tension. I feel angst, when I know I should be feeling a philosophical reflection on gender, sexuality and image.

Your works contain an electricity. I could imagine the horseshoe shape vibrating, seeking release. Your hairs seem static as if they could start hissing and move across the room. There is an immense sexuality in this work. I could see your objects exploding into violence, the horseshoe metal springing back and slicing its way across the room. In this sense your use of materials is amazing, your ability to make the sculptural form more than a traditional object, to make them installational is more subtle than many I have seen here.

I want to see more of your exploration of femininity, but without the black and whiteness of the message. I want to see more display of the contradictions inherent in personality and sexual desire. The topic you have chosen is so heavy, with a tradition of overtly feminist works coming before you. How you open up the territory again, but with more subtlety would be an interesting challenge. This time you have missed the mark.

Pippa

MOIRA KENNY

What more perfect a moment than to see legendary Liverpool DJ Norman Killen dancing with dignity to a Northern Soul stomper! This video introduces Moira Kenny's installation, Walk in my shoes, the title of Gladys Knight's infectious 45 that plays repeatedly in the room. Opposite the video a succession of anonymous faces, projected in quick succession seem at first to have no relation to the dancer or the music. The link though appears to be a third element, sets of headphones through which we hear the stories of a selection of Liverpool inhabitants, presumably the voices of the faces flashing up on the wall. They speak of their life and how their journeys brought them to Liverpool. There's a Nigerian Elder, a Russian Jew, a Mr Woo and an elderly woman, even Norman telling of his fascinating itinerary through his own and Liverpool's musical history. I get the sense that Kenny is really fascinated by these lives and wants to elevate their stories beyond the mundane. She partly succeeds in this, but better quality recording and editing would have assisted here. The projected faces are cropped close, revealing only eyes, nose and mouth, so we notice features and expressions - bearded, bespectacled, pierced, smiling, anxious, resigned, and we begin to try and match them to the voices. I started to become captivated by them almost as much as I was by the intricacies of Norman's footwork. This is a well-constructed, affectionate and engaging installation that works well without the somewhat extraneous reference to genetics.

Bryan Bigg

Absent room? …i.e. I could not find it .

Paul Domelar

STAVROS LOIZOU

His subject as described in his statement is essentially an exploration of his own fear, through a reflection on images in two now classic horror films. He writes of his memories of primal fear in childhood and its correlative in the key moments of The Shining and The Birds. A glance at the paintings gives an entirely different impression. It seems that this is not what interests him at all. The work has a weird confidence. There seems to be no concern or aptitude with the technique of painting, rather, an unfettered and almost joyous naivety and uncluttered directness. Has he been working alone all these months? Ideas of primal fear couldn't be further from my mind!

Imogen Stidworthy

These paintings inspired by The Shining and The Birds are so naïve you think the artist can't paint. There is a Jime Dine thriftstore reversal going on which confounds any belief in the educational establishment. Is there a mischiveous genius at work or are we desperately clinging on to student quota's? Charles Saatchi or total expulsion? This work certainly calls into question the institution of art as a belief system and even the time I give to write these despairing words contribute to the edifice, which thank God I can justify by earning £10. What might become scary is that what is taken seriously.

Paul Domelar

Dear Kieran

On first entering your installation, I turned the light on. At first impression I saw two glass cases containing seemingly delicate constructions. I saw photographs on the walls of these cases, in different lighting. I assumed you were playing with light, with form and with photography. It seemed like a scientific experiment and I was puzzled as to what could be in the cases. In some respects they resembled machines, but they were more reminiscent of trophy cases. It seems that I totally missed the point. When I did turn off the light, the machines started whirring and the strobe light began. Directed at your curious machines it automatically confirmed my thoughts that you were exploring visual forms and patterns. The visual predominance of your installation made the sound a secondary factor and I assumed it was just a technical element of the strobe light. Maybe I wasn't expecting a sound work within this predominantly visual degree show - Maybe in a predominantly visual degree show, you were only able to approach sound through referencing that which surrounded you, in the way that a performance artist may try to break free of a more traditional influence by exploring drawing through action. Sound art is still in many ways the uncomfortable cousin to performance art within the contemporary art scene. It doesn't have to be and it doesn't have to keep its reference points in visual culture. Although one of the more experimental works in this exhibition, I found your manner of presenting the work awkward and crammed. I would have preferred to experience your sound machines first without the clutter of the excess imagery. In a later room, these photographs could have built on your connection between sound and the visual. How you create a balance between these two is what can make or break your concept.

Pippa

SUSAN MASSEY

Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Susan

There were contradictions in the way I found myself looking at your work. An instant reaction of pleasure immediately countered by a suspicion of pleasantness. In 'Welcome to the little Bronx' you explore a new way to use the canvas, but I can't help feeling that you don't take this far enough. Your paintings (despite hints in the titles) are safe and inoffensive. You stitch over the edges of small rectangles of canvas, making them frame themselves. Within these stitched frames you paint the same small image, just different sizes: A suburban house in a bland anonymous landscape. Supporting the canvas rectangles is a metal sheet with repetitive series of square holes. Yet the colours are attractive. They draw me into these scenes. In your attractive uniformity, you may have found the secret that makes people buy show homes. Are your works too pretty? Your more abstract works are seductive, hinting at meanings and forms. Not all the titles are obvious but 'Hill on the side' referred them back to nature again. Your use of colours blurring into each other, made me think of mental landscapes, psychologically, but also as to how we envisage landscape ourselves and the facts we omit in our memory of it. But these were only hints, prompted by your abstractions my mind no-doubt took off on it's own natural course of thought. There is a sensitivity and intuitiveness in your work, which makes me not want to pick them to pieces conceptually - but to just look.

Pippa

JENNY MONTI

Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Jenny

Objects wrapped in plastic. Is this a series of sculptures or an installation? There is an ambiguity in the layout. I was particularly intrigued by the plastic wrapped television. The show that was playing was about lifestyles and consumer furnishings. I wondered if this was by chance, and liked the possible coincidence. There is a sensation of going blind, when one can clearly hear the voices but not see the image, which I thought could be an interesting direction to take your work. It opened up a whole terrain about looking, about what and how we choose to see. All the objects looked heavy and dulled, I assume this was part of your intention. Somehow, though, I didn't feel you were being brave enough. I too don't like eating sandwiches that have been wrapped in plastic but there must surely be a less literal way of expressing this - I'll watch this space.

Pippa

Nothing is like day-time TV. On the rare occasion I get to see or hear it,
it puts me in some sort of trance. Here the TV set is all wrapped up in
plastic. Tightly, as if trying to preserve, or disrupt, the endless stream.
But the wrapping also creates a sort of canvas when the flickering light
from the TV passes through the plastic. A human scale figure on the floor, a
coffee cup and a spoon, a palette, and some trainers. The obvious resonance
to Meret Oppenheim and to Van Gogh's shoes that Heidegger wrote about, makes
me wonder if the artist is trying to preserve a specific time when these
items were on display?

Cecilia Andersson (Exhibitions Curator, FACT)

RICHARD MORROW

Birds and tits! Trashy subject matter, commonplace materials, and corny titles. In Is This Shit or What? a row of bluetits perch innocently above a board streaked with green and white gloss paint that spills over onto the wall and the floor; opposite, there's a version in different colours and without the birds - the shit suddenly turning into cool, abstract design. In One For Morrow, two dead magpies are pinned to the wall and floor, their Funky Fun Foam entrails spilling out of them, as if Rauschenberg's stuffed animals had just got bombed by Lichtenstein's planes. There's an impressive range and ambition in Morrow's art: he works in different media (ceramic, resin, papier mache) and with the exhibition space itself. His irreverent attitude towards the artistic styles he references is healthy, too - pop art and colour field painting sit happily alongside dodgy seventies TV sci-fi set design. I only wonder if the schoolboyish titles (Booby Trap, Arty Farty) do him a disservice, though, as they seem to close down a response to the work; the pieces are humourous enough without them.

Colin Harrison, Lecturer in American Studies, Liverpool John Moores University

This work is a cunning cashcow of FHM wordplay. A sure success of comic book spunk splatters in a testosterone fuelled playpen for derailed ornithologists with a love of language. This is the view from above up the phallocentric tower. But where Magritte destabilises language and its semantic connotations including sexual allusions, this work remains affirmative. The work has a visual language which is bold and rich but does not manifest the vulnerabilty of masculinity exemplified by the exponential growth of man's magazines, cosmetics and the rise of the hen night. This leaves the work wanting haunted by the spectre of thevagina dentaris. The excess of breasts brings out the whistlers from the scaffold revealing them as a new breed of birds.

Paul Domelar

GRAHAM PETTIT

Postcard from a recent graduate to a new graduate

Dear Graham

Your work left me confused. Confused because the meanings I derived from it seemed embarrassingly implausible. Your overriding use of grey, a feeling that the ball at the center of the images was both trying to break free and trying to smash into a wall of tiles or bricks. There was such a feeling of constraint. It led me to consider stereotypes of repression. If it had been made during the Cold War they would have had an obvious political meaning… I think - If the language in the title was Russian that is… maybe it was Arabic? I felt bad for not knowing. And so I started to wonder about the ambiguity. Was I missing something? Some popular reference point - a computer game perhaps? Much about reviewing seems to be about not knowing.

Trying to be clever, as one last attempt to save myself, I wonder if your work could be a deconstruction of football or more specifically of the football. Perhaps attempting to make this object devoid of content by focusing on its form and pattern. In this instance I'll stick with this theory and pretend I never read your titles.

Pippa

I can't read Russian. The titles look decorative but I don't know what they
mean. But in combination with the images, they manage to transport me to the
Russian constructivist period. And to ideas of 'constructing' art. Small
coloured light throws a shy light on the black and white framed tiles. Other
work depicts in painted form, the pattern as they may appear on a football.
There is movement mixed with checker-boards and are we now in the Italian
Futurism? A Vasarely like painting depicts the same football coming out of a
net like structure. I'm haphazardly being thrown around the history of art
but am not sure why.

Cecilia Andersson, Exhibitions Curator, FACT

RICHARD O'NEIL

Black on black, or sometimes yellow ('Black?'); the underlying paint surface revealed by the light at the right angle. If this work is about questions of painting then the minimal information here needs to be handled with far greater precision - otherwise one is looking at a more-or-less black canvas and that isn't enough. It's a pity the canvas isn't always square and some lines suffer from seepage - the detail is essential because that's all there is. I imagine it's difficult to draw so fine a paint layer across an area as large as 'Time Changes Everything'; the small geometric forms, reminiscent of dials, satellites and shadows in space, seem etched into the surface by the brush, executed with enough care to draw one into the intimacy of minute surface changes. There are two other works hung on the stairs which also achieve this level of attention to detail and consequently draw one in even on the simple level of curiosity.

Imogen Stidworthy

Velvet Elvis paintings are kitsch par excellence, a sentimental figure emerges in neon colors from a lush surface. One could say the same thing of Ross's paintings. The paintings, abstract splatters which look like the cosmos or a zygote, recall mythical creation, an effect of awe rooted in sentimentality for some universal and those mysteries of life. His choice of colors is similar to those of a velvet Elvis: fluorescent whites, orange-reds and blues. And, of course, they are painted on velvet, a glittery sheen, radiance darkness.

Special effects amaze us, there is a fascination in seeing the spectacular, and the realm of the spectacle is dominated by a series of effects. These paintings are not spectacular; they strive for the effect of aesthetic pleasure, but not in any way pleasurable.

Joanna Spitzner

Drip paintings on velvet and canvas. I don't know what to think about this work. Looking for a developed or emerging language, I don't find it, or the signs of a search for one. There is a repetition of marks and gestures in each work -dripped paint built up in layers over a shimmering velvet surface - but other levels of reading do not emerge. They have been shown in a café, where they are hung on a red wall and merge as décor with the surroundings. The poetic titles do not give me any clues. In 'Blossom-like Swarm' however I sense a decision articulated: switching from limp drips to more drawn, amoeba-like patches of thick paint, something in their spread across the surface, between random and ordered, suggests another level of intention at work. This could be a good starting point.

Paul Domelar

SUSAN RYDER

The Trousseau Chest is an installation comprising fabrics fashioned into or referencing female garments. Starkly yet elegantly presented in monochrome, the work draws on issues around gender, sexuality and relationships, subverting conventional readings, much in the way that an artist like Cathy de Monchaux has done. Particularly successful is a small child's dress suspended high up, which cascades almost to the floor as it turns into an elongated dress of extra-adult proportions, the girl becoming woman. Literal of course, but Ryder elsewhere mixes her metaphors somewhat, introducing less expected juxtapositions. There are visual references to bondage, straightjackets, body bags. Two padded fabric heads are compelled to kiss, drawn together by a taut strap. There is a wreath of white ladies' gloves, whilst an outsize dress, virginal white, suggests the bridesmaid - never the bride.

Bryan Biggs

The comment book reads 'absolutely horrible - which