National Media Museum, Bradford
Until 25th January 2009
Pavilion, a Leeds-based agency, provides rare support for artist photographers early in their careers. Comprising portraits, staged tableaux, light sculpture, appropriated photography and pictures of the sky, this thought-provoking exhibition showcases special commissions made by five very diverse practitioners.
In a worthy addition to the tradition of photographing detritus (such as Keith Arnatt’s artful depiction of rubbish), Kevin Newark won a Jerwood Award by elevating the lowly plastic bag to the aesthetic level of a galaxy in the cosmos. Not only did these sublime, heavenly objects transcend their non-descript earthly status, you could read an environmental angle into the whole thing too. Here he attempts something similar, focusing this time on interestingly-shaped vapour trails. The results are perhaps a modern-day equivalent of Alfred Stieglitz’s cloud pictures with an ecological twist.
You may be familiar with Moira Lovell’s alluring yet painful portraits of slightly uncomfortable young women in school disco outfits, highly original work which also bagged a Jerwood Award. Here, she takes a similar typological approach to top women footballers, each standing next to the same male coach. These images continue her exploration of awkwardness and the politics of gender, as well as tapping into other issues such as workplace relationships and the importance of seniority.
Tess Hurrell’s best-known previous photographs involved some ingenious sculpture using materials such as cotton wool and talcum powder to recreate the form of well-known explosions. Here, things get a little more nebulous as she produces images of interesting studio-based light experiments, presented in such a way as to be simultaneously solid and comprehensible as well as remaining abstract and mysterious.
Jo Longhurst’s striking, much-published and fascinating series on whippets was driven by a preoccupation with perfection. Here, she transfers this interest to humans, appropriating hundreds of archive photographs of gymnasts in action and using them to create a sweeping, block-mounted installation.
Peter Ainsworth’s practice (“a combination of sculpture, performance and photographyâ€) is very much about art. In transferring curatorial activity to a non-museum context, his previous work - images of people with a dead bird on some waste ground, behaving as they might with a precious painting in a gallery - challenged some commonly-held ideas about art. Here, he has people gardening in very unlikely locations (such as next to out of town supermarkets and by-passes), while drawing reference to other artists.
The results of these commissions don’t always hit the heights of the artists’ previous output, but that isn’t really the point. What unites these very different photographers is their willingness to push their medium and to show us something we haven’t seen before, and it is refreshing to see work of such ambition and innovation.