Chealsea BA Fine Art Degree show - 2008

This is the tenth review I written of the 2008 degree shows and I felt very disheartened on Monday morning by the size of this Fine Art show – is this battery farming of artists? The obvious result of the large numbers is that the work really had to jump out and grab me, not necessarily to be loud, but effective.

The show catalogue proudly states that this is the first year of the new “open framework”, an experiment in not typecasting the students from day one. The suggestion is that the quality of the work has benefitted, and there is a lot of strong work in among the more average. The mixture and range of work is also good with no real themes emerging except, that there are a few animations (perhaps with this cohort size that isn’t odd). One thing that does seem a bit strange is the presence of two religious spaces which were lacking their performances when I visited!

Among the makers, the aesthetics range from immaculate fabrication, neon and mirrors as found in the work of Steve Rosenthal to the obsessive crazy excess of stuff in the installation of Amos Shein, who’s price list is a work of art in itself. For a cool £10,000 Saatchi will be able to buy the lot! On another humorous note Janak Odedra has dismantled his Ka - and piled all the bits into a neat shape on the gallery floor, a bit of a one liner but it appealed to me.

Nicky Walsh produced a site specific installation in an octagonal tower, apparently his original proposal was for a hexagonal built structure, but when he was offered this space he adapted the plans. Using three camera and projectors and four mirrors, Walsh has produced the most unsettling space imaginable. We know that placing yourself between 2 mirrors gives an infinity of reflections, well infinity is still infinity but here the different views and the many angles create real confusion and the pixilation of the projections gives a painterly and more ghostly effect.. Add to that squeezing up a narrow spiral staircase, and the architectural details in the space and the effect is unforgettable. Also quite stunning, was the ‘plaster bricks in ink’ piece by Bella Szyszkowska. A precarious curved wall of carved plaster blocks, some with tiny surreal staircases carved into them, sits spectacularly in a circular puddle of black ink.

Making the viewer integral is an element in the work of James Early. He has sampled all the horrendous crashes, explosions and disasters he could find, and these are back projected onto a large screen. But right in the middle, as if ignoring all the mayhem behind, he projects the viewer. We can get blasé and desensitised to Hollywood explosions of the blazing inferno variety but this disturbing, solarised experience was a bit of a shocker.

The paintings in the show included odd, kitsch bas reliefs from Jose Lourenco, one of which even had a live plant in it! And a textured painting from Luke Routley, with added object trouve, that has more than a passing reference to the work of the Boyle Family. However the 3d paintings of Mathew Musgrave were wonderful, especially the tiny irregular canvasses slathered with structural layers of paint and obsessively decorated with minute dots. Other notable paintings were the precious architectural gems of Beth Louise Walker and the large majestic works by Margot Sanders which included an unusual diptych composition of two horses. I wasn’t sure originally about the landscape paintings of Robert Sherwood. They have distant horizons and recognisable skies but they all have very structured abstract foregrounds, which sets up a huge tension that left a strong impression on me. On returning through the room later I was converted.
I very much liked the photographs of Thomas Green, which were in the form of giant contact sheets. A couple of furniture props accompanied them from what must have been a weird performance – a very large open air furniture installation arranged in ‘room plan’ fashion on a green surrounded by respectable buildings. However even these were over shadowed by the exceptional work of John Briggs. In ‘John Malkovich style’ he has directed and manipulated his parents and caricature, grotesque dolls into the weirdest scenarios and displayed the graphic monochrome images in a very tightly packed together, filmic way. A real highlight from such a huge show.