This Show is Ribbed For Her Pleasure
by Michael Paulson

nyartsmagazine.com l Now in New York
August 10, 2005

Andrew Clarkin and Simon Pittuck of the Keith Talent Gallery in London have curated a strong group show at Cynthia Broan, the tenor of which is aptly summed up by the title–an agile fusion of the sophomoric and ham-fisted with the knowingly conceptual. Although much of the work engages with visible currents in the contemporary scene, the show is an illuminating introduction to a lineup of British artists who have staked out their own wry patch of land–imagine Rabelais with a post-ironic insecurity about what’s even funny anymore.

The dichotomy between the shit-smearing impulse and the sardonic formal gesture is largely played out through a sensitivity to materials. At first glance, Vanessa Jackson’s attractive, quixotic
series of abstract drawings appears to join in the low-tech inkjet craze. However, the occasional stray mark and ragged line betray an insistence on the handmade, even if that hand seems to aspire to a clumsy, robotic elegance. It’s postminimal drawing meets the original Microsoft paint, and it works. Chris Wraith brings a similar juvenile energy to his halloween-colored mixed media work, prophetically titled Milton. Channeling Sol LeWitt’s drawings of cubes, Constructivist design, and video game graphics, Wraith has made an effective little monument to haywire mysticism and wanting to see the known world blown smithereens.

The idea of taking old-fashioned dysfunction and making it art-world ready through a staggering series of ironic refractions continues with Shaun Doyle and Mally Malinson’s sculpture, Cape Disappointment. The clever stupidity of the title is reflected in the objects assembled: a pile of wooden beams, clay figurines clutching the cartoonish paraphernalia of self-annihilation (booze, needles, etc.), and square, Monopoly-esque houses anthropomorphized into chunky skulls. The artists have gone so far over the top, and yet so far below expectations of craft, that one would be hard pressed not to like the jumble that results. Meanwhile, Matt Wooding’s oil painting, Slide with Skulls and Shit–titles that "say it all" seem to be a theme here–is an ebullient synthesis of Johns-style personal iconography, formalist composition, a screaming Toys-’R-Us palette, and a rousing "fuck you." And Clunie Reid’s brash xerox diptychs (including Cat/Blow Job, which features just those two elements) seem to ask, isn’t it horribly shocking that I did this, even though it’s really not that shocking, but you’re shocked anyway, or are you? Reid has found a convincing way to delve into the contemporary relationship between originality and absolute cynicism.

Other standouts in the show include Melanie Stidolph’s large-scale digital photos and Sarah Bednarek’s screenprinted couch. Stidolph’s picture of a white horse and its foal has a strange intensity (due in part to its ethereal, washed out color-scheme) that refuses to be immediately characterized as "doing" this or that. The sincere beauty of the photo counterbalances the My Little Pony irony of the subject matter. Bednarek’s couch rises above a great deal of the "crafts"-oriented work one sees today, largely because of her talent for understatement. The piece features a repeating pattern of woodsmen, hooded flag bearers, and shotgun-toting thugs in various sylvan settings, tricked out in a nauseating shade of forest green. All of this might have ended up as simply sarcastic in less capable hands. But the bland subtlety of the figuration lends the work an eerie normalcy–it would be easy to have a seat on the couch without even noticing the creepy cast of characters in their paramilitary Arcadia.
If this summer’s crop of group shows has been largely concerned with darkness and glibness, this one separates itself by going much further than most towards obsessive self-scrutiny. The treat here is that the aesthetic and psychological hall of mirrors–which bounces the spectator between extremes of naivete, mean-spirited sophistication, calculated ugliness, and the sublime–is so dizzying and hyperactive that one ends up jolted back to the old-school notion of simply enjoying looking at the art.