Text by Ali Bramwell
This exhibition looks at the work of three very different artists. As the title suggests the works occur at an intersection between something that could be talked about as landscape and the ideas that become embedded in those sites. The underlying idea regards environments as being inseparable from the politics of those people who inhabit [or view] them. The show plays with the contrast and association of two ideas; Politics in its broadest sense and Landscape with all the weight of tradition and rebelliousness that the word inspires. Rather than selecting works by kind, suggesting they are alike or parallel, the curatorial approach was to triangulate three different artists whose work rubs the two key ideas together in distinctly different ways. Political Landscapes was programmed by the Blue Oyster and curated by Ali Bramwell.
The show featured photographs by Jennifer French of Russian buildings (built between the great wars) that could be seen as monuments of the utopian hope that preceded the Stalin era. Also included was a video by Gregor Kregar; digitally altered natural history video footage of a white pointer shark. Projected at large scale in the gallery the shark now swims in the garb of a used car salesman. The last work of the three was a site work installed by Jim Searle, literally creating an environment of urban decay within the gallery.
Jennifer French’s dream city is a selection of digital prints. The source materials are period photographs of modernist architecture, publicity photographs taken immediately after the buildings were built between 1924 and 1938. French is specifically interested in the prevalent feeling in Russia and Germany between the two great wars that inspired the construction. She feels that the zeitgeist of the time is invested in the architecture, that the images now carry a subtext of both optimism and disappointment. The optimism that prevailed during that period between was intense and utopian. The disappointment is from a retrospective knowledge of how that sense of idealism was later rapidly subsumed by totalitarian politics. French uses these images as symbols of a system of thought and also as documents of idealism.
Gregor Kregar’s digitally manipulated footage of a single white shark continues and extends the discussion around power and monuments. Kregar uses a generic black business suit as an allusion to the power and prestige this item of clothing gives its wearer. The great white, the most famous of all shark species is dressed and presented as a new predator, bizarre and yet instantly familiar. The combination highlights and tickles irreverently at preconceived attitudes towards a creature that is both admired and feared.
In contrast to the previous two works, Jim Searle installs directly in the gallery. A gradual accumulation of materials resembling urban waste challenges notions of representation. We are presented with a choice either to physically negotiate his constructed pathways in a temporary and uneasy landscape, or to remain on the fringes as a viewer framing the work as a scene. Here is a landscape that could be talked about as parallel to a shift of social structures and prescribed pathways; to step into it, is to consciously navigate unstable territories.