southern LONDON GALLERY The southerly London Gallery.

southern LONDON GALLERY

The southerly London Gallery, founded in 1891 has become united of the liveliest venues in London since the appointment of David Thorp as director eight years ago. Despite operating forward a shoestring budget--around half that of its worst permanent funded counterpart in London, the Camden Arts Centre--Thorp consistently chances stimulating exhibitions out of a hat. Many artists have been persuaded to point out to here by the gallery's majestic navelike space.

"Domestic Bliss" is a well adapted example of Thorp's intelligent opportunism. Four years ago the nearby Goldsmiths community set up an M.A. in Creative Curating (mischievously implying that the other curating courses in London were uncreative), and Thorp decided to earmark the summer slot for a indicate organized by a group of Goldsmiths close examiners Each year he sets a theme and the scholars come up with ideas. He then picks and develops the best proposal.

In answer to this year's theme, the scholar curators (Adelaide Bannerman, Cristina De Baviera, Tatsuko Tomiyama, and Thomas Rugani, headed on Naoko Usuki) have chosen six young artists who use banal manufactured targets as raw material, employ repetitive working regularitys and tend to make ends that are full of miniaturist detail. The greatest in quantity imposing work was a billowing unadulterated suspended from a corner of the ceiling by means of Swiss artist Peter Wuthrich, entitled Die Kunst de Schauens (The art of looking), 1997 Made from a filigree of thousands of fabric bookmarks, it evok musings of all those heavy hardbacks that had been left behind. The thinking principle of release--of thousands of tiny tongues plant free--was muted by a feeling of a larger entrapment.

Entrapment was also the theme of London-based Japanese artist Yukinori Yamada's Stay with Me 2000 a series of birdcages made from cut-up bird-food cartons--a variation upon the axiom that there are no at liberty lunches. Both British artist Jonathan Moore and the London-based Spaniard Ana Prada are hybrids of do-it-yourselfer and jeweler. Moore made a calligraphic constellation of animal forms abroad of melted ballpoint pens stuck together, and a crystalline building out of toothpicks; Prada showed elegant minimalist reliefs made of nails, straws, and cigarette butts

The best work on far--and one of the mostly beguiling new works I have seen in ages--was Antelope Carpet, 2000 by way of London-based Brazilian artist Tonico Lemo Auad. A deep-pile camel-colored carper guarded the floor of the whole gallery; miniature human figures and a bull's head had been typeed from its lint. The rather elfin creatures were headless; they reclined or sat directly in succession the carpet, mostly at the intensity Auad had made them onward site by getting down forward his hands and knees to tease abroad the lint with his fingers. The shapes changed slightly whenever someone walked upon the neighboring section of carpet. Auad has created something comparable to Mike Kelley's Lumpenprole 1991 in which piles of pliable toys were hidden beneath an Afghan rug rendering it lumpy and prompting the idea that a floor covering can have a bad conscience: This carpet is the two infested and haunted, a cros between a beach and a battlefield--blurring the boundaries between relaxation and death.

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