Culture

Blue Oyster Gallery
Until August 7


The works of seven artists currently on show at the Blue Oyster explore alternative yet ever-increasingly familiar artistic media, such as audio, film, transmission, and appropriation of ‘expired’ technology and art methods. The show glances back almost nostalgically at now-familiar alternative art practices, most of which still value the art object resulting in some beautifully crafted ‘artifacts’ combined with a contemporary interactive sensory environment. 
Nigel Bunn is my favourite of the show, with works that appropriate archaic methods and machines to produce contemporary images. His elaborate constructions combine an antique charm with unique mark making such as in The Capshot Autography Project where he uses old photographic glass plates to capture the sparks made by exploding toy cap-gun pellets. The tiny light bursts resemble the stars and comets of early astronomy photographs and housed in an archaic handmade wooden light box the work has a nineteenth-century museum artifact appeal. A more complex construction is Bunn’s Paper Based Sound Recorder. This work began as a Gestetner image duplicator (a sort of proto-photocopier) and with plenty of electronic know-how, ended up as a sound-to-image translator producing unique abstract images on paper as interpretations of Bunn’s guitar and synthesiser. 
Pieters’ stunning audiovisual work harnesses the mesmerising, hypnotic appeal of the slow motion long-take in a beautiful film combining high contrast black and white images of a power station, urban buildings, and an overflowing dam. Inspired by a philosophical idea that places two autonomous words together, Pieters’ film is accompanied by a soundtrack that is not pre-determined by the images and denies the expected cinematic action/reaction relationship.
Media Povera, a group of works curated by Sally Ann McIntyre, combines media described as the “media formally known as new.” McIntyre presents works that belong to the ‘old age’ of the media object in the face of new digital art media, including such works as a hand-crafted radio transmission receiver and a ‘skipping’ record player covered in ornamental detritus. Alexander MacKinnon’s work, Vanitas, sums up the collection through the notion of mortality addressed by Vanitas painters. Cassette tapes, lashed together with wire and covered in cracked white paint demonstrates how quickly technologies, and technologies as art practices, can become old-fashioned and obsolete.