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From: Sven B
Date: 09 May 2010
Time: 08:49:00 -0500
The Exchange Gallery is a cool space in the old fashioned sense of the word, the recipient of unconditional love from those constantly battered by the unrepentant daubings of revisionist nutters wishing to shout into the eyes of British Rail traveller's emerging from six hours of re-franchised toilet ruin, scalding coffee substitutes and that new breed of fellow traveller The false Shouty West Country "accent" borrowed from Rick Stein and the Archers. What now for man raised by Puffins? Since the mildly entertaining Goldsmiths But is it Art infotainment docu-diorama seemed critically old hat, provoking perhaps a few guffaws from some reptile awaking from a decade or so in slumber, work in the genre of Jill Bradley has proliferated, mutated and transgressed many of the parameters and in a substrategic sense, exposed its essentially non aesthetic core to this same battered populace who no longer care about cleptomaniac art students as much as being rediculed by Art Speak. Applying the sort of standards achieved by crafts including photography, to light-box installations or printed applications has always presented a dichotomy, essentially the tension between glib commercial hoardings announcing retail products being appropriated for a more subtle, covert socially engaging dialogue. Once this has been done as it has been now for several decades, the media can no longer sustain the message. A vague connection between the tired old flower growing industry in the Isles of Scilly and West Cornwall is alluded to, but never wholly engaged. Are we to be sympathetically exposed to an archive of images portraying flower pickers in an environment that is unashamedly and brazenly bloated by the Grey Tourist Pound and even the Grey Tourist Euro?. There is a feeling that this show has been drafted in as an unfinished, or work in progress and this is something that cannot be done with this particular genre, essentially this is photography shoe-horned into an installative mode via light-boxes, and the sort of deranged clutter "about absence" that quite honestly just seem to be horribly patronising. No attempt to look into the void or to pitch her "love of a relationship between literature and photographic image" against the full force of the subterrainean and topographic anomalies that cause the demise or "concern for worlds" that are " going through difficult periods of self reflection". I like the Exchange Gallery space, although recently I've felt intimidated by a tall member of staff always menacingly sillouhetted against the backlit windows, it's a difficult place for a tall person to stand up in.