It’s hard not to feel that Ron Muecks’s recent use of altered scale and Yue Minjun’s focus on a fixed expression are combined to better effect than either in the work of Juan Munoz, as seen in the matte grey 2/3-sized versions of his brother installed in his 2001 Turbine Hall otherworld. A decade on from Munoz’s untimely death, this show brings us up close to figures made in preparation for the Tate’s ‘Double Bind’, plus works on paper covering several of the Spanish trickster’s main themes. ‘My work is about a man in a room, waiting for nothing’, said Munoz, out of which he brings an uncanny presence to the theatre of what cannot be said.
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| Still from ‘Night Street Touch’ |
Graham Gussin
@ Siobhan Davies
Studios, 85 St George’s
Road, London SE1 6ER
Artist-curator Charles Danby has put together a retrospective of Graham Gussin’s painting, photography, video and installation with plenty of implied and actual sound and movement in tune with the function of the architectural award-winning dance studios. They include a list of possible films, such as ‘Film things that are hard to explain’, ‘Film prevention’ and ‘Film text works’ – which is what happens to the list. I particularly liked the short videos of rapid touching of objects, one of the ways in which Gussin intervenes to call attention to spaces or things: his use of illumination rigs and dry ice (as in the well-known ‘Spill’, currently on show at Tate Britain) work similarly.
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| My Wife, custom photo throw |
Katie Steciw: Live Laugh Love @ The Green
Room, Lower Level, Rich Mix, 35-47
Bethnal Green Rd – Shoreditch
The Green Room, hidden under the cinema near Shoreditch High Street station, is only open on Sundays and by appointment with its energetic curator, Ché Zara Blomfield. New Yorker Kate Steciw’s European debut is well worth catching though, as she takes cloying sentimentality, hackneyed subject matter and kitschy means of reproducing photographs (on tiles, canvas and blankets) and undermines all that by turning their combinations into something quite other. The eponymous keywork distorts several copies of the commercially available metal wall text ‘Live Laugh Love’ into near-abstract sculptures which summarise the sardonic approach.
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| Installation view with ‘The Magick Door (Kissing Gate)’ |
Alison Gill: ‘Legend Trip’ @ Charlie
Dutton Gallery, 1a Princeton St
- Clerkenwell
To 16 June: www.charleduttongallery.com
A legend trip – for example to the site of a notorious murder – is a rite of passage which stands here for the inner and outer journeys triggered by sculptures and sculpturally-constructed drawings and collages – all of which exchange forms seamlessly with the black-beamed patterns of Charlie Dutton’s distinctive Tudor space. The centrepiece is a circular Kissing Gate: it turns to suit, and is draped with enough patched-up bicycle inner tubes to tell of considerable travel. Add Klein Bottles, folklore and an imaginative programme of events, and there’s good reason to make the trip to Alison Gill’s first home city solo show in nearly a decade.
Steven Morgana: ‘The Future Feels Like a
Phantom Limb’ @ La Scatola Gallery, I Snowden St (off Worship St) – Liverpool St
It makes sense that Franco-Australian artist Steven Morgana should show in the corporate lobby-like La Scatola Gallery, for he proceeds to lure the viewer by transformation and beauty, only to lambast the energy-hungry nature of capitalism. A neon rainbow turns out to be fed by a petrol generator; a geosodic dome is built from boxes, the triangular basis of which generates the wasteful volume of off-cuts used as a counter-balance to keep the structure hovering above the gallery floor; and photographs of petrol in water bottles are titled to point out that the original water was the more expensive content.
