Ed Saunders

The Gabeler and Douglas installation at 15 Elder Street is an altercation with art in an antique space. After the heavy iron clatter of arrival you step into a narrow corridor and soon find yourself in a small reception room. The walls are painted in green and cream and in places the paint is peeling into generous flakes. Domestic and intimate, it feels almost honest, though situated just within the flash bulb field of the laminated art fairs and their safety tape.

A large cabinet captures the eye in the main room. An array of absent voices is presented on dark wooden shelves, images are mixed with collected objects and nothing is identified. Sarah Douglas's painting 'Egg', framed by two scarlet phalluses, which belong to the house, occupies the space and forces a glimpse of hidden human and social interiors. Above, there is an echo of Hokusai in Marenka Gabler's 'Vulcano', creating a sense of damp recognition, something she repeats in her work based on Goya and Velasquez.

Faces dominate the exhibition, the pictures and the spotlights stare. The dark rows of windows across the street stare too. Only the candles flicker freely in the gloom. Living prisoners are reflected from the walls - Gabler's 'Chimney Sweeper Boy' is a haunted profile in earthy ochre and red contrasted with pallid grey-stained white.

From the front door the viewer meets architectural prints from the dusty and distant continent and, in radical contrast, an untitled image by Douglas. Her collages reveal secret lives and hidden longings, implanting printed images into paint. Spare ink outlines and scarlet emotive shapes lend an oriental elegance to some compositions. Sharp and whole, her work is a delicate counterpoint to Gabler's dusky echoes of the past.

Many voices struggle in the house. There is a distinct sense that the objects come from different people, each marking the space. The life of Dan Cruickshank, the house's owner, has been locked up behind closed doors and loaded with the weight of the viewer's curiosity. The objects again serve as moments of recognition, the paintings as confusing mirrors and lenses of the viewer's gaze.

Douglas's work dwells in the space and comes in from outside while Gabeler's seems to live in and through it. Inhabitants is a show where the viewer is invited in, but remains estranged. Each artefact is a narrative freeze-frame. The space is inhabited by a scattered, random past which eludes continuity with the present. It has been painted over, emptied, refilled and peopled.

The exhibition will run from 16 - 21 October 2009 at 15 Elder Street, London, E1 6BT. It will be open daily from 12pm - 8pm, or by appointment.