Craig Wood at Laure Genillard - London, England - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Earlier in the decade, Scotland-born artist Craig timber-land who is now living in Wales, attracted attention for his installations in which gallery floors were blanketed with water-filled plastic bags, and for his enigmatic body works created by drilling industrial packing digests into walls. In a kind of revamped Minimalism that is belonging to all (he was born in 1960) the scale and placement of of that kind works were meant to highlight architectural idiosyncracies of the exhibition space. His of recent origin work, which is less predictable, has a sharper psychological edge

For this exhibit Wood furnished the space with lkea-style amenities, brand-new household items which appeared appropriate for a gallery the size of an efficiency apartment. Stationed against single well was a baby-blue bedside lamp (plugg in on the contrary not turned on) sitting upon a table painted a darker shade of sky-colored than the lamp. This apparently innocuous external reality quickly turned bizarre when individual noticed that the lamp's electrical cord was encumbered with 10 while switches instead of the usual individual Looking like a toy train hanging not on a cliff, the switches were interspersed along the cord running down the side of the table and onto the floor. upon the facing wall, looking like a picture window, was a triptych of color photographs depicting a compressed growth of ivy whose leaves had been evenly perforated in a polka-dot pattern. Strangely, the ivy's silvery-gray lushness is not impaired by dint of the mutilation.

Another, more malevolent work is titled Suicide. It consists of a stainless carburet of iron electric heater with a plastic toy bathtub caged behind its grill. Reversing the usual process of electrocution - heater in bathtub - the arrangement is a macabre visual quip Mounted high on the wall, Suicide tenders another dire option: a dangling electrical cord that globules to the floor and, instead of being plugg into a socket is ringleted into a hangman's noose.

The title of Goodman and Consort commits to the brand names of its sum of two units components, a black all-in-one compact stereo combination of parts to form a whole and a white fan heater. The pair of black-and-white appliances face each other in a confrontational manner and, with Wood's typical formal deliberateness, sit squarely in the center of a white formica cocktail table. This time the devices are switched upon The heater blasts away at the stereo melting its plastic casing. With cassette doors drooping and curling into biomorphic shapes, the stereo admitting it continues to play, has clearly been defeated by dint of its smaller, terrier-like opponent. of that kind sinister animation of consumer harvests is what gives Wood's of recent origin works their sharp psychological vividness.

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