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Review Apr 14 2009 « | »
Shoe Horn at Crimes Town The Crimes Town website bills their current exhibition as 'four artists shoe-horned into one group show', and implores viewers......

Emma Bennett

The Crimes Town website bills their current exhibition as 'four artists shoe-horned into one group show', and implores viewers not to "confine interpretations.merely to any common denominators". So, this curatorial shoe horning is a little act of necessary force, but one which aims to induce a sort of freeing-up, an interpretive barefootedness which should range beyond the 'mereness' of comparative speculation. I'll give it a go.

Bradford Bailey's four white works play on absence, the almost-seen. The evocative quality of the materials listings function almost as works in themselves - 'canvas and dust' sits two away from 'passport photograph and breadcrumbs'.

Nearby, in Doug Burton's digital animation, a seething ball of dark, virulent and endlessly morphing substances - rock, smoke, ectoplasm - unfold and entangle themselves in the centre of a white screen. This is strangely watchable, compellingly visceral stuff.

Elsewhere, scrawled faces gaze out of Brian Cheeswright's paintings, smears of colour suggesting flesh in meltdown, falling away from form. The odd eyeball or set of teeth lend these faces a cadaverous horror, but also a sort of funny innocence; at times they have the look of careworn muppets.

There's much to enjoy, but Crimes Town can be an awkward little space at the best of times, and I can't help feeling that this show is a rather uncomfortable fit. Not because the works are large, or the rooms crowded. Indeed, everything feels resolutely medium-sized, and each work maintains something of a polite distance from its neighbours on the fresh white walls.

Perhaps it's this sense of politeness, this caution, this whiteness, which bothers me. The A4 pages at the gallery door give a list of titles, but instead of the usual framing statement, the show's title is followed by an evasive dot, dot, dot, fading into the whiteness of the page. Perhaps this is indicative of the contrary gesture of this anti-group-show-group-show, yet it feels strangely like the result of a lack of engagement, a lack of time, or an excess of caution. Surely a good group show is always more about friction, those angry, playful sparks between things which never wholly 'fit' together. Surely a few verbal cues wouldn't hurt?

Here are three: mutation, ungraspability, facelessness. Oh, and just to upset things: a smattering of starlight, a smattering of crumbs.

Shoe Horn runs until May 10th. You can find Crimes Town's website here.

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