The Angus-Hughes gallery in Hackney is currently showing the last installment of its exhibition in three parts, curated by Fieldgate Gallery. The series aims to explore how a new gallery 'becomes' into the world: we may see the official launch as the point that a space becomes a gallery, but in actual fact that space had elements of a gallery before this point, and is not entirely a gallery for a long time afterwards.
The current exhibition houses works by five artists by Alisling Hedgecock, collaborators Stewart Gough and Tom Ormond, Paul Eachus and Nooshin Farhid. Each work seemed to deal with the artist's response to the element of chance, and how this is altered when it is deliberately suggested.
The Ninth Slellation, Aisling Hedgecock
Aisling Hedgecock's work consists of three stalactite-like sculptures meticulously crafted out of tiny polystyrene beads and religious publications folded into pyramid-like shapes. The shape and nature of the structure is so suggestive of a natural creation that when standing under it, the viewer half expects to have water dripping on their head. Yet this is contrasted with the bright neon colours of the clearly man-made polystyrene, highlighting the human craftsmanship responsible.
Close up from The Ninth Slellation, Aisling Hedgecock
The other artist who particularly interested me was Nooshin Farhid, who produced video works that ran parallel to one another. Whilst there was no clear defining feature of the works, some of which were made up of text, some of graphs, some of images, the brain seemed to make an inexplicable link between them. It was possibly simply that each video hinted at a planned purpose. In one set of four screens, each showing a film, a reel of text showed transmitted instructions, two graphs hinted at statistics, and a moving image seemed to form a plan for some kind of structure. This combined to convince the bemused viewer that something was happening, had happened, or was going to happen that they did understand, and could not be a part of.
Video by Nooshin Farhid
As the exhibition does not encourage the viewer to differentiate between the works of each artist, it instead forces one to consider the broader issues raised. What are the relationships between these works, and what are the differences? How do they interact together? Without the preconceptions always present from the labelling of a work, the viewer is able to see each piece in its purest form: as an artwork.
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