UNFLINCHING STARES, ONE REBUS AND A GLIMPSE OF ITHACA

Union Gallery’s Autumn Exhibition is a mixed bag. Containing works from some 16 (mostly familiar) contemporary artists, there is no prevailing theme or style. What follows, then, are this reviewer’s personal highlights.

Sophie McKay Knight’s ‘The Equation’ (right) is one of four portraits here, three of which overlay glimpses of DNA code onto the female form. Questions are raised in them about the disparity between Nature and – in the girls’ artificial exteriors – Nurture.

Are these red-cheeked, bright-lipped dolls free entities, or the inevitable expressions of their genetic and social circumstances?

These slightly ragged maids are disarmingly bare, their unglamorous faces and narrow frames suggestive of the vulnerability they feel inside. Knight’s are not pretty images, despite their pretty colours. And for all the clumsily applied mascara and lipstick, her subjects' faces have the puffy clarity that follows tears.  

‘Blackbird’ (below) – which does not belong to the DNA sequence – I found strangely violent and beautiful and calm.

Joyce Gunn Cairns’s artistic gaze is similarly frank. Her painterly analyses of relationships, self-projections and burst vanities spare nothing. She gets to the nub, not to be cruel but with unflinching determination and sometimes excoriating honesty.

This seemingly straightforward painting of a cat, therefore, comes at first as something of a surprise. The almost jokey title ‘Hello Dolly’ presumably references both the exuberant matchmaking of Streisland’s Dolly Levi and the artist’s greeting to her sitter. In the bottom-right-hand quadrant of the painting, Gunn scrawls ‘Cats leave paw prints on your heart’. It is, one feels, an uncharacteristic, sentimental expression, coming from Cairns.

But then one's mind reviews the cat’s expression, her species' self-contained indifference, those eyes cast across the shoulder, They are not exactly hostile, but neither do they return affection. Unexpectedly, this work seems to explore the absence of true matches, the unattainability of mutual love. It resolves at last, perhaps, into a confession of loneliness.

Now, two confessions of my own.

First, I don’t usually care for Colin Brown’s collages: busy and ecclectic assemblages of modern popular culture. ‘Lucky 7’ (right) I like a lot. I wouldn’t say I understand this rebus, its title or why the images are grouped together, but at least I recognise them individually, and enjoy the interplay of form and colour and positional composition. 

Second, I usually enjoy Dylan Lisle’s creepily exact renderings of skin, fur and feather, but on this occasion did not. The ‘Three Blind Mice’ in this triptych (below) are gruesomely fascinating. They dignify, one might charitably argue, three mundane deaths. They magnify and solemnise the small and sometimes laughable. They resemble – at a stretch – three little martyrs on their crosses. Personally, I really wanted not to look at them, but found myself repeatedly drawn back. This is, I suppose, a mark of their perverse success.

Finally, to end with unequivocal praise, I come again to Jackie Gardiner’s ‘Odyssey’ (below). First seen in April, I enthused then about its hints of Ithaca and ‘Atlantic fishscale greys’ (Breaking news, 8.4.13), and  have little new to add about it now ... except to say that the work continues to astonish and delight. I urge you to go in and marvel at the real thing.  AM

Union Gallery’s Autumn Exhibition continues at 43 Broughton Street until 30 September.

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