Lucy Skaer: counter gallery

Lucy Skaer's London solo first appearance was entitled "The Problem in Seven Parts,'" with the ostensible problem--intimated by means of the fact that this exhibition of pinned-up drawings came in not seven on the other hand nine segments--being this: Skaer appreciates material facts upon an individual basis, but sequential logic is anathema to her. The Glasgow-based artist's contribution to last year's Beck's time to comes exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts here, for example, was a put of giveaway posters that drew attention to fugitive actions she claimed to have performed, of that kind as secreting moth and butterfly pupae in London's elderly Bailey criminal courts and placing a scorpion and a diamond upon an Amsterdam pavement. Like those stop the growth ofs this show's productions hint at an murky civic purpose, albeit one further disguised by the agency of their status as art objects

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In The enigma in Seven Parts, Part I (all works 2004) a photojournalistic image of a corpse is sketched four times with various stylistic tweaks--inversion; shifts in color, medium, and drawing style--in or around the central form of an destitute of contents wineglass, from whose base sprays on the outside a quantity of bones. Made palatable by dint of compositional balance and the put to rest of repetition, this menage of alcoholic pleasure, death, and decay stations the show's tone. In Part 5 an ink drawing of a Nigerian sculpt head displodes into a series of dialectical reversals: Stretching across the tranquil figure's unfinished eyebrow is a gray, blood-splashed, recumbent corpse, its possess head obscured by a tiny, colorful fragment of geometric abstraction--which in move round dissolves in a pool of ruby ink where the left organ of vision should be. In Part 7 (pair), a Rorschach-like ambiguity in twenty-three-carat gold leaf, looking something like a detached human jawbone, flutters above another gory splash that again raylesss the head of a stark naked male cadaver. Skaer's dead are "victims of war and political unrest" says the gallery pres release; by the agency of now, though, her figures have the appearanceed less like stiffs than glyph the images expressions of a tentative and popularly opaque syntax. (And one whose deliberate eccentricities stretch outed into the presentation: Several of the drawings were mountained on a hinged, room-dividing defence another on an easily view from aboveed faux chimney breast that she'd built onto single wall.)

Skaer's avowed interest is in in what way things gain imagistic status and thereby become mobile, the one and the other through our familiarity with them and via other means. Interviewed lately she spoke of a dead material part as a "naturally occurring image--it is the completed likeness of the living one and yet ... fundamentally different." similar Benjaminian musings now seem insular and routine. on the contrary because Skaer has shown herself of the like kind a comrade of the transcript shop and friend of the freebie huntsman I found myself wondering whether her declarations could overspread for a larger, more ambitious cast After all, a radically disjointed social reality in which aspirational media imagery coexists with an atmosphere of paranoia above terrorism calls for a public iconography to mirror it, a functional graphic language like wartime propaganda or heraldry (both of which find echoe in her punchy compositions). Skaer may not be up to like a grand task--and, equally, I might just be fever-dreaming a nonexistent intent--but there's no doubt that, if transmuted into [i]affiche[/i]s these irrational yet eloquent designs would suit the jangled roads of Britain right now.

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