Tuesday 11 May 2010

Sophisticated Boom Boom review.....

REBECCA GELDARD'S TOP 10 LONDON SHOWS IN MAY AND JUNE 2010

Sophisticated Boom Boom (in b&w)

Domobaal

Until 15/5

This group exhibition, as Ailbhe Ní Bhriain's filmic dissolution of place, context and matter in the stairwell suggests, is as inkily elusive in concept as in form. In the most simple sense, perhaps, it describes a sensory breach of expectation. Grey, the mid-ground or the norm, becomes a transmutable substance pulled between the polar ends of the tonal spectrum; tuned in and out of pictorial focus by the presence of colour (the key placement in the upstairs galleries of Lizi Sanchez's Koonsian evocation of sculpture, a box-frame done up like a dog's dinner on a plinth and Lothar Götz's ode to abstract-painterly and retro-domestic spaces on canvas). The “boom, boom” of the fabulous Shangri-Las song at its core varies in potency, work-to-work: from the thud of an assumption hitting the decks (when you realise that the toolbox debris in the stationary compartments of a desk draw have been hand-carved by Mhairi Vari out of granite) to the distant foghorn call of a memory just before it arrives in the mind (such as Jeffrey T Y Lee's white-wax and black-ink deptictions of Borneo and Sharon Kivland's re-framed images of locomotive smoke), and the shoeshuffle into the surreal (as Stephen Dunne's watercolour man in mono prepares to hammer-whack the space where his head should be).
sophisticated-boom-boom-domobaal-07.jpg

No comments: