Rainbow by Ting Tong Chang
It’s befitting that the atmosphere of Not Lost’s final show, from the Surface gallery, focuses heavily on the importance of environment and aesthetics. The culmination of work from Surface’s Open Gallery submission, draws on themes of location, landscape and isolation which seems both neat and appropriate as a conclusion for this strictly arts festival.
The Open Show has each work building into the next as an exploration of man-made construction and how human development borders into nature. Photography by Emma Sywyj (Man Painting, 2009) captures a brief glimpse of human exhaustion, breathless amongst a rubble of tools and paint. The man looking on wistfully colours the very room he’s decorating. This idea of nature’s invasion is thought through beautifully as well by Alice Myers in Winterless Skies (2009). Using c-prints and multi layered texture patterns taken from several skyscrapers, Myers muddles the precise balance of fine architecture and an unpredictable, unknown biological force to create swirls of muddy, dark tones wreaking havoc with the grey, glossy polish of each building. It is both an ornate and psychedelic print that itself struggles with the elements.
Alice Myers - Winterless Skies
By contrast, Tong Tong Chang’s Rainbow (2011) what is artificial becomes natural as Chang has ordered a chain of battered shopping trolleys into a welded arc sweeping across the floor. The physical strength of these objects, engineered to survive several lifetimes, questions the impositions that mass consumerism asks of the earth but with an urban touch that offers it some humour as well.
A lot more of the exhibit has a melancholic balance with an ethereal pool of light that surrounds an inner city car park (Andrew Carson, Untitled 2, 2011), a pale canvas littered with infantilised etchings of an Aspen style ski lodge (Lyndsey Redford, Summit of Cam Aosda, 2011) and household furniture hanging from one another in a precarious pendulum (James Clarkson, Ordering of Colour and Form, 2011). Of these more tonal works, Tokyo by Joseph Cutts (2011) and Untitled (I Like You, I like you a lot) by Alicja Dobrucka really stand out. Tokyo uses the midnight darkness of downtown Japan to change the blinking lights of its capital into sneering, devilish, creatures lying in wait; Dobrucka’s delicate photography on the other hand uses the prism of a high rise estate as a metaphor for unrequited love - the feeling of life shrunk down in cramped surroundings, trapping the loneliness of the subject who stares out the window onto a bland city.
The Surface gallery have gone to great lengths to ensure that this Open Show has not only a wealth of fine talent to present but a logical and organic feel to the way in which it has been curated. It is both a triumphant conclusion to the exuberant Not Lost festival as well as a cohesive and stylish exhibit in and of itself.
Surface Gallery website
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