Omni-Shop
Lucy Kaye
Ever since Damien Hirst’s "Freeze" exhibit, art students in the UK have great expectations to live up to. How to draw attention to their work? What can be truly new, now that warehouse shows out in the East End are de rigeur? A big shout would be too YBAish, but a small yelp won’t be heard by anyone. Oh, what to do?
Recently three art students from Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art, studying
under the British sculptor Richard Wentworth, put together a show of work at a small space called Omni-Shop in the Kings Cross area of London. This part of town is nebulous–it is still where prostitutes and drug traffickers congregate, and where flats can be rented very cheaply.
But it is also undergoing a huge renovation campaign and galleries are sprouting up on Britannia Street a few minutes from the Kings Cross tube station–Kenny Schachter’s second Rove gallery in London and the second Gagosian in London are both on this street. On the same evening as star New York painter Cecily Brown opened at the Gagosian, the Ruskin students opened a few streets away at Omni-Shop, hoping to attract the runoff from the bigger opening.
It’s a smart strategy; but strategy and art has to match for it to work.
Cheeky plotting demands cheeky art and that was why Hirst’s stratagem was so successful, because his art does not back down. His art stands up front and carries on with the same kind of assertion to the viewer.
Cecily Brown’s paintings are bold and sensual and emotional. They are the kind of work that draws so much out of the viewer that any work seen after it has to be equally vibrant, with much stored inside it that shines out of its surface, to engage the viewer again.
The work of the Omni-Shop artists–Clem Blakemore, Kasia Fudakowski and Eloise Hawser–is many things but it is not vibrant and sensual. As a group, the work is quiet, subtle, mysterious. It blends into the architecture of the raw space, downplaying the individual characters of its makers and notions of personality. Only when you look closer do the works repay your generosity with some insights of their own.
Fudakowski’s two oranges on metal wheels stay together, brought to motion by the wheels but not changed by it. The oranges remain what they are–tangy, secretive, bright but protective of their soft centres. Another one of Fudakowski’s works is a toilet plunger, stuck onto a wooden post. The suction centre of the plunger is squashed against the post, the rubber surrounding the bulls’ eye of the plunger bulging around it. The plunger is not graceful–it is violent, something someone who needs something has done. It squelches determinedly to the beam, sucking what it can out of it, its wooden handle sticking out like a widow’s peak.
Blakemore and Hawser are more geometric in their work, slightly Matta-like in their concern about the relationship their work has to the building. Blakemore’s metal spheres lean together only slightly more gracefully than the cement around it meets the floor, but this iota of added grace changes the purpose of the object enough for us to pay more attention to it. Hawser is even less concerned with differentiating her work. Her red wooden wheel is undistinguishable from the cement and wood around it.
Such enigmatic work forces a dilemma in how it can spring to the viewer’s attention. It’s an odd answer, putting it next to Cecily Brown.
