Tuesday 26th July 2005
Metro (page 21)
By Wayne Burrows
In a world where more information is collected about different aspects of our lives than ever before, it was only a matter of time before artists got in on the act. The 23 artists involved in this project are delving into decidedly odd corners. There are bells, monitors, sirens, stacks of forms and walls of brightly coloured charts inside Angel Row Gallery, giving the space an oddly festive atmosphere.
Abigail Reynolds offers sculptural assemblages of stepladders, rusty tools and other objects, each of which represents the evolution of a word from the Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Snack’ is traced to a dog bite, ‘awkward’ becomes a teetering seesaw pivoted on a mangled garden fork. Helen Frosi, meanwhile, seeks winning numbers by mapping banana skins onto Lotto cards in the spirit of pataphysics, the absurdist science of imaginary solutions created by French writer Alfred Jarry in the 1890s.
Christian Nold’s Bio Mapping hands visitors a device that maps walks around Nottingham in dots that constantly change from serene green to excitable or startled red, depending on the stimuli encountered. Like something from hi-tech TV series 24, Nold’s piece fuses the hi-tech with old fashioned curiosity about human behaviour. Other works range from the satirical to the plain eccentric, but few are without their fascinating moments.
