4 Exhibitions

Artists who play with appearances, and Iceland.
Zacha Rosen
Published on February 06, 2012
Updated on December 08, 2014

Overview


Body weight is a seemingly impossible thing to be competitive about. With different shapes, sizes, metabolisms and all those different ideas of attractive girth, you shouldn't be able to quantify it enough to compare numbers. TV tries all the same. Frustrated by these futilities of size, Jodie Whalen's Worth my Weight in Gold shows a short wall of screens with artist Whelan on gold painted exercise equipment. She exercises with passion, discomfort and sincerity. On two stands nearby are lumps of toffee representing the weight she's working off. They drip onto the floor.

Art duo Catherine or Kate — Catherine Sagin and Kate Woodcroft — present the results of a residency in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. Their series of photo pairs set a top row of, mostly bemused or welcoming, store clerks against photos of the two artists in each shop they visit. A tally is posted on the wall nearby. The margin of victory is pretty narrow. The artists say they asked each clerk to rate the pair of them "Who is better looking?" Though the smirk on each clerk's face suggests they liked the question most of all. A video work from the pair nearby interrupts a pastoral scene.

Peloton co-director Adrian Gebers' elegant woodblocks riif on the typed '3'. His big letters with a germanic style feel like a child's game with numbers, taking a square 3 turning it constantly sideways to W to E to M and back again in paper and wood.

In Erica Molesworth's vivacious  Just Passing Through dust and smoke wrap around movement, shadowing the sifting of red earth and green fields laid out like a blanket over the landscape. In a video piece curling, red smoke gets sucked backward into a flare, to the accompaniment of grins. Molesworth's photos are concerned with mining and tourism's impact on rural world. But despite this, the exuberance she obviously felt in taking these images dominates them all.


Image: Erica Molesworth, Just Passing Through

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