Article: "The exhibition revealing summer's dark side"
The structure of the show is semi-abstract and associative in form and there are several intertwining lines of work that run through it. Some works directly engage with the mire of popular culture. The show opens with the film work Century 21, a masterpiece by the late Jeremy Blake, that takes the ‘American Dream’ on a bad acid trip and it closes with Ed Fornieles’ Pool Party, a half-an-hour long video (featuring Mercedes Kilmer) which I see as a deadpan critique of reality TV and entertainment culture – implying a clear narrative direction in the show. In between we’ve got Petra Cortright’s flash animation works – with their mash-up of cheap online soft porn content and virtual overabundant landscapes, and Gabriele Beveridge’s work that elegantly appropriates and critiques the aesthetics of luxury culture. -Nick Hackworth
Another contrasting strand of works is abstract and aesthetic and includes Kadar Brock’s works of paper that manifest the aesthetics of erasure, Thomas van Linge’s minimal, cool and reflective works and Isabel Yellin’s exuberant, fabric based abstractions – which remind me of serious gestural painting fused with pop-songs. These works function in the show as a metaphor for the surfaces and screens that define the space of modernity. Sites of seduction. Deconstructing that idea we have Nicolas Deshayes’ strange and compelling pieces – both seductive and grotesque – with their jellyfish forms floating on a shiny, plastic whiteness and also the cracked surfaces of Arslan Sukan’s scanned images of smartphone screens and of Ali Emir Tapan’s heat tempered mirrors which evoke a fragile and beautiful otherworldliness. -Nick Hackworth
