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From: Ben Zanoe Category: Art Date: 03 January 2009 Time: 04:03 PM Review: The newly slate clad visage of Newlyn's historic gallery seems to have played some trick of perspective on the eye of the approaching beholder, emphasizing the smug "architecture" lavished upon the new external extension which has eclipsed the original Edwardian granite Passmore Edwards building and yet curiously the slate looks so diminutive, like a Father Ted gag about scale and proportion. The Newlyn Gallery took a few minor changes over the years, most recently growing an extra torso in nearby Penzance's excellent Exchange Gallery. Somehow a vestige of the original gallery objective still lingers on even though there is a contemporary democratic "transparency" on display. This going through the motions enactment is partly the outcome of the significant ear bashing received after the Newly Slate Clad unveiling; Uncalled for but the voice of the average, disgruntled art gallery visitor in these environs is intoxicated by tourism which roughly equates into naturalism and a comparably conservative outlook towards public art. Since the gallery is in someway influenced by these forces my visit to the Newlyn Society of Artists - Working Small exhibition was infused with these little questions, and I'm at pains to admit that the dichotomy experienced by the crowd pleasers and the real mCoy's (of which there are not enough) extends throughout this lacklustre show. Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinsons video installation was not new to me but it is a great tonic to the senses and should not be missed, seeping into the justification were some strains of the absurd but perhaps they thought they should write about something meaningless, er... no. There is palpable evidence that the fault line opening up between the rusty indigenous salt encrusted fishing industry and the blown in whitewashed has now all but slowed its progress, fishing boats are decomissioned by the same Objective One remit that contracts arts initiatives, although theres much more at stake here, as terraced fishermens cottages that were saved from clearance in the thirties (by fishermen) are now given to purchase by Upcountry types who let them as holiday cottages. A visual checkmate stands in front of the Bolitho Garden entrance of the Newlyn Gallery, a romantic depiction of the hard working fisherman throwing a coiled monkey-fist as Francis Mortimers early staged photograph of a Scillonian pilot did on silver nitrate.