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Independents Biennial Show
, Victoria Street
22nd October – 6th November 2010
Reviewed by
A painter, a photographer, and a printmaker all the way up the wind-ee
and windy stairs. All the way to the top of the Victorian gem that is
the Jerome Building, and the small and spacey Curve Gallery. Thomas Williams
marble paint effects are covered in architectural angles and a sheet of
Perspex. Trying to figure out what’s what I recruit the thoughts
of a fellow art fiend but, though all his words, on their own, I love,
the lot strung together don’t stack. This is a solo job. I have
to loosen up, toss off the shoes, drop the imaginative inhibitions, let
it flow. OK, the angles are a grid of the city. Behind, the marble paint
city as it really is, the dynamic everyday, the kind and the mean, noir
in the daylight; and in the light, Norris Green! Thank God, some of us
are going to be saved.
Printmaker Lisa Who’s wall installation of black figures and symbols
on white squares are based on a picture diary travelling through Northern
Spain, taking in San Sebastian, Bilbao, and floor prints of the Guggenheim.
There is some influence from the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, who
kept goal for Real Sociedad before going on the tools. How come all the
great artists who played football (Camus and George Formby spring to mind)
are always goalies? Surely one of them must have flew up and down the
wing? Lisa’s prints include another sport, the blood red of the
bullring, the only colour in a set of intriguing figures which become
really interesting when you hear the stories behind them.
Finally, if there’s anyone out there still says photography’s
not art throw them in a taxi to Curve NOW. Two rotten pears at the end
of a long white linen table cloth could be Vermeer all over again. The
odds and ends of life, things forgotten and left behind are the stuff
photographer Dave Penny picks up on in his still life show, Pair of Pears
(2009). Not much to say after that.
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