Joe Devlin: 'Gatefolds.'

 
                             

                              

Joe Devlin’s work has historically centred on copying, transcribing or somehow reusing the stains, interventions and scribbled marginalia that borrowers have left peppering the pages of library books.

His Todmorden-based exhibition ‘Gatefolds’ is at a slight variance from his usual productive theft. Here Devlin has lifted a page of simple line drawings recording the different structural designs of farm gates, probably from a 1930s book. All twelve designs have bold no nonsense regional names: ‘Pembroke’, ‘Montgomery’, ‘Cumberland’, and so on.

Devlin’s page compiling these appropriated reductive drawings are blankly neutral presentations indicating these hinged structures; hard delineations of the operationally active which are themselves mechanical reactions to any compulsion to expressively map with the tools of drawing.

Acting as retreating markers between the mucky black sky-mirroring  puddles, the crusting cow-pats, the bumps and contours which coat rough horizontal rectangles of field and ground; the organizing frameworks of gates map the pastoral landscape.

The thick black lines framing blocks of white paper suggest drably functional pieces of landscape furniture, ones designed to either regulate, or at least to slow the pace of, independent movement But they also act as guides for the viewing eye to trace the hermetically sealed linear structures bounded by its framing horizontal oblong format.

In a further act of physical transcription the linear designs have been re-presented as small aluminium-silver freestanding, shelf-bound sculptural works. Miniature Modernist inflected rectangles with the beginnings of gentle, Origami folds dictated by the vertical and diagonal lines of the source diagrams which have then been photographed, the photographs layered in a pile in the corner of the studio. A potential book-in-waiting.

A simplistic reading of the show could assume that the territorial musings of a confused mid-Brexit UK are somehow being alluded to by an ‘appropriation’ of regional variations in directive field furniture. This is, however, an intentional comedic act of misdirection. 

The real substance of the exercise is both much simpler and considerably more complex. The literalness of the lurching moments of transcription folds back on themselves, from deformation of the authority of the original taxonomy of regional gates to their productive reimaginings as ‘art-objects’ which then, via photography, head back to the flat universe of images and their inevitable supporting text.

Even if they detour through rigid and legible formal structurings - the written word, sculptures shapes and depths, photography’s ‘indexicality’ and digital shiftiness - the meandering and interweaving functions of author, reader, viewer and producer are the actual constants. The assumed authority of an  originating authorship is the slyly targeted centre of the artist’s criticism, even if this includes undermining the primary importance of artists themselves in the whole interpretive game.

Chester Tenneson: 'Half Of Two Days Of Everything'.

In Salford's Paradise Works, Chester Tenneson's exhibition 'Half Of Two Days Of Everything' mixes sculptures formed from collisions of accrued kitsch objects with examples of the more widely exhibited text and signage pieces. 

Titles seem to be lifted from literature and the lyrics of pop songs; all in the service of mining popular culture to construct physical incarnations of moments of poetic sarcasm.

Tenneson has a preference for the high-fidelity banality of functional objects with a plasticised shouty-ness, everyday things as heightened visual events nodding towards the distancing paradigm of digital purity. They are objects that aspire to the cheeky inconsequentiality of flat and decorative signage.

The largest pieces are floor-bound combinations of functional items and cartoony toy items echoing blandly useful things. So 'Out Here On The Mountain Top' (2018) is a square art packing case topped by a miniature but not insubstantial black umbrella, open and, impossibly, standing up by the curved handle resting on the wooden surface. 'You're Like An Automatic" (2019) has a handful of wavy plastic chips spooning each other in the curved indentation of a polystyrene brick's surface. 'More, More, More' (2018) uses three trainers as snug bases for three fatly inflated inflatable walking sticks; their curving handles grumpily facing away from each other. 

The best of these works is 'The Victory Cry' (2019); a table tennis net raised from the ground at each end of its length by aluminium-silver cleaning stanchions, its horizontal sag emphasized by a weighting square of sticking plaster. It sulkily radiates the prosaic inevitability of a predictable British Wimbledon defeat.

The smaller sculptural collisions presented on a line of white shelves are more immediately like-able but stick in the grey matter less successfully. The exception being 'Ashes to Ashes' (2018) in which a lumpy ash grey arch of an aquarium rock and a horizontal plastic cigarette bring to mind a pissed golem on a fag break.

Tenneson's confident use of the volume of real space has been ratcheted up further by hijacking Paradise Works projection and digital image playback space as an almost blacked out installation. A short line of cinema seats face a floor grounded light-box announcing 'A PAUSE', the restful break time from opening night socialising undercut by the regular sonic irritant of a clacking metronome.

Even here the space of the room is formally restructured as a series of flat theatrical layerings and positionings of viewer and information-object.

Cognisant of the retreating vagueness of object-biased culture Tenneson seems to enjoy taking pre-fabricated things for a wander back into the arena of flattened signs; that is to say literal, functional popular signage. This adds a tragicomic incorrectness to proceedings and yet, far from nonsense, the works themselves radiate an ironclad logic; one which is, however, hard to re-articulate outside the idiot slap of the visual.  

The flatter text on board paintings of 'HALF OF TWO DAYS OF EVERYTHING' (2019) and fourteen part 'Birds never look into the sun (Social media paintings)' (2018 - 19) have the visual punch of informational signs. Blocky text sits on simple decorative grounds, avoiding the diaphanous layerings of obsessively painterly engagements with surface, and transcribe the spatial grandeur of the more bombastic of Ed Ruscha's horizon-hugging signage into claustrophobic square patternings like polite slices of wallpaper design. 

'ALLEGORICAL NUDES' announces a dark blue acrylic and gouache; 'PHOTOGRAPHED AT LEAST ONCE    IF NOT TWICE' darkening blue letters observe seated on a washy pink background; 'BOB' has the eponymous Bob (or possibly an insinuated verb 'Bob') as text on a scruffy skyblue hovering over a white strip of horizon; keeping it simple 'TUPPERWARE IN HER APARTMENT' states a blank white square of canvas board - and so, inventively, on and on goes the pithy little text works. All enjoyably slightly left-field and smile inducing.

The pivotal piece is the most easily overlooked one, 'Entre tes reins (Unknown Meeting)' (2017) already handily 'meta' with its description of 'painting-drawing printed onto vinyl, on vinyl.'  A small portrait format rectangle of yellow vinyl stuck directly on the wall, each corner infected by a thumb print scale, slightly raised simulation of blue tack. 

It places the viewer on the wrong side of a hastily produced office notice, combines the functional, banal and eye-catching with a spatially impossible vantage point, and in the process reanimates the attenuated confabulations of the neighbouring sculptures; enforcing an unanchored solidity to them. One which then loops back to the interleaving two-dimensional simplicity of the text work.