One warm day and a thunderstorm mean British summer time has arrived. If you’re looking for London galleries with seasonal accessories consider a visit to Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery which has a roof terrace and, as of the past few months, a ringside view of the new Olympic stadium. In a sense the stadium is responsible for the opening of this new gallery. Forman’s, a venerable East End fish smoking business, was evicted from its old premises by the Olympic-sized upheaval and has now been resurrected rather appropriately on Fish Island, that wedge of Hackney bordered by the River Lee and Hertford Union Canal. En route to the gallery visitors can glimpse the fish smoking area and even try some of the products in the adjacent restaurant.
Currently showing at the Smokehouse is Spectacle, a mostly photographic collection of work by eight artists. Spectacle is billed as being about “archetypes including the Pin-up, the Pope and the Goddess” so it promises religion, sex and fashion – three topics that have fascinated humans since the time of cave paintings. The artists who deliver most on the sex and religion front respectively are Rosie Emerson and Casey McKee.
Emerson’s series of Goddess photos are glossy, black and white, almost calligraphic in their two tone precision. One of her models has the beauty of a young Christine Keeler; looking at a soaring picture of her as half-naked faun/dominatrix (see above) I found myself hoping she combines Keeler’s looks with the media savvy of Mandy Rice Davies. She certainly has a marked ability to resist both camera and photographer and the complicity they often invite. Suspended in mid-air gripping a chandelier in one hand, her nipples like frosted lava and her eyelashes morphed into what seem to be Salvador Dali’s moustache she maintains an aura which suggests her own personal imagination is far more powerful than any mere pose or outfit.
The way we use outfits, clothes and accessories, to define ourselves and interpret others interests Casey Mckee who has presented the same man five times over to this exhibition. Using a combination of photography and oil painting on canvas or linen he has created a sort of identity parade in which a blond, bearded man takes on varying personas. In each picture the man’s dress is basically the same – a robe and a tall hat rather like a bishop’s mitre – but the atmosphere is changed through the use of different colouring, accessories and poses.
McKee uses an accumulation of small detail to modify and unsettle the viewer’s ideas about his bearded cleric. Physics shows the man apparently in formal, public appearance mode wearing a cross and red robe and sash yet the seat of his chair/throne is covered with a sheepskin that seems to hint at pre-Christian, shamanistic ceremonies. His hands are clenched and a bare foot shows beneath his robe. This trio of exposed, vulnerable looking hands and foot echoes the shape of the cross and the ordeal of Christ’s crucifixion.
McKee told me that in another of his paintings, Subversion of Science, he had originally depicted the cleric turning an air gun on his open, distorted mouth but had then decided to paint out the gun. Stupidly I neglected to ask him why he’d made this decision but it certainly gives the picture a more ambiguous feeling. Innocent of any knowledge about the gun I couldn’t decide if the man was fulminating against science or was actually crying out in pain as the victim of some kind of scientific experiment.
McKee’s interest in clothing and what it signifies links his work to Artangel’s current project A Concise History of Dress, a book and a series of costumes and installations created by psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and fashion curator Judith Clark. Right at the centre of Spectacle’s opening night Kirstie Macleod’s performance piece seemed to bring together the worlds of couture and cave painting. Enveloped below the waist in an ocean of sculpted blue-green silk she painted in slow motion, black lines on a black wall like tiger stripes in a dark cave.
Spectacle runs until 27th June at Forman’s Smokehouse Gallery, Stour Rd, London E3 2NT
Image: Goddess # 1 by Rosie Emerson
