poppy

South London Gallery - Camberwell

Pae White - To much night, again
Possibly because it was the first nice day in about a million years the buses were packed and horrible so I was in a bit of a grump before we even got to the gallery. The work made me feel a bit ill looking up into it and it was slightly hard to judge where the strings were. There was also quite a few people in there just taking hundreds of pictures with their expensive cameras. One pic is fine, but why not just experience the work while you're actually there? I didn't get the relevance of the words and it seemed a bit like they were only there to make it appear more substantial. Perhaps the words mean something to the artist but they seemed annoyingly arbitrary. In the blurb there's all this business of it being 'site specific' but it could've worked in any space really. Just filling it up isn't really working with the space?
Also, its been done about a hundred times.

Eoghan Ryan - Oh wicked flesh!
There was a video piece in a room with splotches on the walls. I don't really like video pieces in galleries. People coming and going, invigilators popping their heads in, there wasn't even a door so it's not like you can really get into it. There were bits I liked and found intriguing, but then there were bits that were a bit annoying (shot of a pack of the antidepressant sertraline in a cupboard as if its somehow edgy or something). Also the sound quality was pretty awful throughout. I don't know if it was intentional but it was annoying.
In the next room there was a fish bowl on a towel on the floor with some goldfish in it and some things on the wall but they didn't really leave much of an impression.

If it had only been up the road I wouldn't have been so disappointed but it just wasn't worth the 3 buses to get there.

I went to my Grandma's before Easter. This is a picture of my Aunts' dog drinking tea out of a bowl. For some reason.

posted by poppy @ 7:44 pm