Sculpting in the gallery with an unusual industrial material, Frances Richardson’s Marx-quoting title casts her – with a little irony, surely – in the role of alienated labourer generating surplus value. But she allows the Concrete Canvas (www.concretecanvas.com), more typically used to make instant shelters in areas of conflict, the starring role. Teetering or propped, it brings a satisfying hardness to would-be-soft forms suggesting drapes, a discarded sleeping bag and a deadheaded flower. And their mixture of the abject and the sensual comes in a slate grey which sets off the stone-coloured walls in Lubomirov-Easton’s programmatically non-white cub
Anissa Mack: Body Copy @ Josh Lilley, 44-46 Riding House St – Fitzrovia
Dear Victoria, 2014 – Painted aquaresin, cloves – smells good…
This complex but instantly captivating first London solo from Brooklyn artist Anissa Mack turns on skewed religious imagery (legs presented like holy relics, with slots for offered coins, ‘cathedrals’ of revolving ham tins filled with amethyst), craft traditions (quilts, arrowheads), copies and fakes (the quilts are cast in resin, the arrowheads are just chips of flint), the obliquely personal (applying of her own freckle pattern to a photographed mannequin) and how memories can degrade (the cast quilts are at one remove, but the remnants of that process are then cast in pewter). What’s more, you get to carry an artwork around as you go – which, as you’ll gather, you should…
There are at least five ways to look at young Siberian artist Uliana Apatina’s simple yet rich installation of bath, light and salt in this one room gallery. Formally: what merges into red light from without proves to consist of pink, cerise and amber fluorescence, denying any straightforward red. Symbolically: is that salt as in the bible? Referentially: Dan Flavin meets Miroslav Balka… Biographically: suppose Apatina dreams of diving into salt, and grew up in a cramped flat with a photographer father who used the bathroom as a ‘darkroom’, the Russian for which literally translates as ‘red room’. Or, of course, personally: what does the strange scene trigger for you?
Leaves II (The Couple)
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Deptford’s five Enclave galleries, yards from Deptford station and so six minutes from London Bridge, are well worth a February visit. Sculptor Neil Zakiewicz has had furniture manufacturers make painting-cabinet hybrids which neatly demonstrate the logic of their own making: spray-painted through their own holes when folded up, then unfolded and hung so that gravity determines the exhibited look – which is itself provisional, as rotation would change their form as well as their orientation. Painting as a flatpacked game of consequences.
To 8 Feb: www.tiwani.co.uk
The Barbers Abidjan
Josh Blackwell: Never Uses @ Kate MacGarry, Old Nichol St – Shoreditch
To 22 Feb: www.katemacgarry.com
Plastic Basket (Man O War), 2014
Brooklynite Josh Blackwell is known for sewing onto everyday items: previously at Kate MacGarry handkerchiefs and sweaters. But his plastic bags, ongoing since 2004, are the most convincing: a more extreme contrast between worthlessness and art value; good use of the iron (protected by baking paper) to flatten and merge the bags (they also take laser cutting well); and bags seem naturally of the street – indeed, Blackwell has taken to working on a found a bag and then returning it to its original location for a photograph. You might also be reminded of jellyfish (after which some of them are named), although I tended to see cats.
Drawn Edinburgh Shapes
Talking of male embroiderers (away with those stereotypes!) there’s plenty of intricate sewing in Dean Hughes’ first move into the application of colour. Wooden frames are hung with shapes of calico, crazed by the creases which the dying process causes in such a sensitive material – and which remain visible even after they’ve been ironed (though actually I seem to achieve a related effect with cotton!). The effect is bunting / clothes dollies / paint samples / anthologies of abstraction with a hint of seriality and a sense of potential exchange – indeed, Hughes says he found himself swapping colours around once the works were in the gallery, though he’s not encouraging visitor revisions!
PREVIOUS CHOICES STILL ON
You see my mother, she just doesn’t know how to light a lighter, 2014
Glass Cat 2 @ Wimbledon Space, Wimbledon College of Arts, Merton Hall Road
10 Jan – 14 Feb: www.arts.ac.uk/wimbledon/wimbledon-experience/wimbledon-space
A cat watches a wine glass rotate as it’s spooked by light in Helen Maurer’s Prowler, a work which felt endangered at the private view – though why shouldn’t found objects return to circulation? – Danielle Arnaud’s Kensington redoubt. Yet this show, on tour with two extra artists and a text by Peter Suchin, picks up on the alchemy rather than the cat or the glass, notably in William Waterhouse’s beautiful bubble-making machine and Sarah Woodfine’s table of drawn sculptures of the ingredients – bat, chrysalis, root, frog – of a witch’s brew intended to incite the sensation of flight when ingested. The cause, according to Woodfine, would have been the palpitational effects of contrasts, a sense of which we do pick up in the stimulating mixture here.
Images courtesy the relevant artists + galleries