Mash Ups at Kowalsky Gallery

Mash Ups at Kowalsky Gallery

11 August, 2008
by: Katuschka

Mash Ups, the new show at Kowalsky Gallery, takes as its starting point Stuart Semple's artwork of the same name. It's a neon-flecked assemblage of collage, paint and sculpture that critiques the impermanent nature of cultural mores in the wake of the communications age.

Semple's work has a naïve charm as it delves into the tumultuous psyche of the teenager for whom the hopelessly romanticized past is nothing but diminished returns. The images are at once evocative and cheap, self-aware Warhol parodies which bring to mind the bland iconographic scavenging of an Athena shop, mocked with adept detournement. From Nathan James' ego-savvy, fashion-plate, acid-bright collages to the mock-shlock graphics advertising the show, the exhibition explores the hyper-real, sharp and over-saturated world of the modern teenager's throwaway nightmare.

I headed down to the gallery on Thursday 7th August to hear artist Piers Secunda present his thoughts on the show. Interestingly, his is the only work which seems to jar with the post-pop theme. An artist with a thorough interest in technique and a broad spectrum of influence, Secunda is clearly allergic to the Barleyesque irony implicit in much of the work, as he earnestly discusses his defining inspiration as 'a tube of paint stuffed down the back of a radiator'. It may be hard to keep a straight face whilst someone verbally orgasms over a succession of identical large white cubes used to demonstrate progressive work. But hearing Secunda's take on his art does flesh out some notions about meaning and intent; and his unflagging enthusiasm for technique bestows a certain level of respect for sustaining the precariously delicate aura of importance and cultural necessity that the art world propagates.

Secunda's later work is where his credibility (and bank balance) steps up a notch. Inspired by shanty towns, bonsai and religious iconography, exploding from the frame in jagged and bulbous fragments of dried paint, they are hip pieces of urban decay you can hang in your home for that pseudo-Brick Lane warehouse look (without the crack addicts). His work is interactive (despite its delicate nature), tangible and striking, so much so that his rhetoric can be overlooked; after all, a modest, self-effacing artist is much less fun. He still carries around that paint tube as a lucky charm.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Nicky Carvell takes a slyly nostalgic glance at the rise and fall of the superfluous Nineties boy-bands by citing East 17 as the four-headed totem of the genre. Her epic dioramas depicting Brian Harvey's 'tragic', allegedly potato-induced, fall from grace (and his Mercedes) in Peace from the East (Brian ran himself over); and a disemboweled Tony Mortimer, are a joyfully ridiculous homage to Smash Hits-style adulation and its ultimate demise.

It is interesting that an exhibition about throwaway culture presents the idea through the medium of another arguably throwaway culture. This results in a self-perpetuating, infinite regress of loss of meaning; like an endless row of vapid magazine covers. In this way the exhibition is pandering to the demographic that it blatantly ribs. But this is no criticism: the pieces are intriguing and striking and offer some serious and twisted eye candy for the Vice reader and Nineties reject alike; even if you do go along just to laugh at Brian Harvey's overwhelming idiocy all over again.

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Katuschka