And yet we did. Over the long footbridge, past the concrete bollards, momentarily transfixed by the sight of the twinkling waterfall picture in the window of the real estate agent and up that long unforgiving flight of stairs, we finally made it back to Scott Donovan Gallery. There are five works in the latest show, which is somewhat unpromisingly titled Marking Time, featuring the work of Mark Hislop, Jake Walker and Laresa Kosloff.
We’d never seen the work of Jake Walker before and his two works in this show, Most and Untitled 1982 Pt 7, are top-tastically intense black and white drawings that put us in mind of those ultra detailed Chinese landscape paintings where objects receding to the horizon are depicted as part of a vertical plane. Walker’s drawings are built up from tiny dots and lines and are structured like scientific drawings of crystalline structures or perhaps DNA bundles. Associations aside, the works are deftly executed, marvelously obsessive gems.
Mark Hislop has two paintings facing each other across the intimately scaled gallery. One is a series of intricately connected geometric lines called Foreeverof and, on the facing wall, is a painting of a side section of a head showing a brain with geometric lines zapping their way around inside the person’s skull. Called Scinosonics it seems to be a mirror of the Foreverof, painting depicting what we are experiencing inside our heads when we gaze into the interlocking lines.
Stuck on a plinth on the side of the room is a TV screening Laresa Kosloff’s Deep & Shallow #1. Staged like a modern dance work crossed with a children’s TV show, the work is a series of sketches where people wearing black plastic bags and looking a lot like prunes with legs prance around in a white void. They occasionally get into strife with black boxes stuck to their feet – either with Nike swooshes painted on or, more ominously, with flags of many nations – but for the most part it’s fun and games in the world of the bag people. Someone suggested to us that Kosloff took her inspiration from Grug and The Rainbow, and the bag people do look a lot like the kid’s book creatures, but for it really reminded us of Pingu.
