Chelsea MA Degree Show 2008

I’m wandering round and round, up stairs and down stairs, have I seen everything? what floor am I on, which block am I in, have I seen everything? A map would help. I’m no ‘Chelsea virgin’ but I swear it gets no easier to find the work in their degree shows and I always leave convinced I have missed the best thing! When I found an obscurely placed sound piece (in a stairwell) I felt the smug satisfaction of the discoverer, but then I couldn’t find the artist name anywhere! So I quite like “the piece where the stairwell is compared with a pine tree” and enjoyed the descriptions and lists of tree names, but you don’t get the credit, which professionally is an own goal. Two installations were closed as well, one for technical reasons and one to do with broken glass – I hear it was memorable. I assume lack of an invigilator was the reason that I was unable to view it!

There is a lot of painting in this show, quite a lot of it figurative and on traditional canvasses! The results vary tremendously from Tyler Hilton’s disturbing cat pictures to Arina Gordienko’s heavily loaded monochrome self portraits, always with a bright red headscarf. There are huge un stretched canvasses by Adriana Rivera with squidgy delicious paint effects and also using fashionably fluorescent paint is Hun Kim whose odd characters seem to be made of jelly like ectoplasm. Flora Whiteley has cleverly hung a group of beautifully painted, but unremarkable small paintings, and the end result is very striking.

It is often hard to grasp the intensions of the artist in this odd situation of a degree show, the work is made for academic marking, and then we arrive without previous knowledge of an artist’s work and with only the title to help us to try and try to work it out. Only occasionally do students provide a statement, and then sometimes the writing lets them down. However it is useful to know of the humble South American origins of Robson Cezar when looking at his bottle top paintings and lovely, ambitious bronze collection called “Favela Dogs”. Titles do give us a clue in the Pippa Galty installation. Her small paintings are titled “My Everest Adventure 1 to 8” and the two other pieces “How to make a mountain part 1 and 2”. So we get the idea, but the surreal spectacle of a freezer full of large ice lozenges with anchovies set in them and one suspended and melting was a great spectacle, but left me challenged. Pariya Kanasen also intrigues and confuses, the floor is covered with salt (I can’t imagine how much) and the room is peopled with totemic ceramic pieces which turn out to be silver birches. This gives me the feel of a Russian forest in winter, but one screen in the middle of the room shows a stream of sampled clips of financial news (current and archived) from TV and web and another (in a corner) is a repetitive spooning of what looks like grain! The title “…and all from 9 to 5 in a birch forest, 2008” helps only in a limited way. I shall however remember the experience if only because of the salt in my sandals!

Jarrod Sanderson juxtaposes footage of a butchery plant with a reflected close up of someone eating a raw fish. Equally strange is his surreal film of what seems to be an immigration interview but then, roles reversed, changes into an S and M movie with the added twist of the actors wearing artwork! I wasn’t too impressed until I found the room where it had been filmed, a lovely space lined with distorted, monochrome atlas pages and a Muybridge border of the nude descending stairs. On the table is a Home Office book titled Life in the UK. Finally I was fascinated by the obsessive work of
Sylvia Matas with her “Altered map of central London” in which she has painstakingly painted out the street names in a circle in the middle.

NB I have since found out the name of the artist with the sound piece in the stairwell - he is a Canadian called Michael Benjamin Brown.