David Godbold, Dublin
David Godbold’s method lies in the ecclesiastical tradition of the palimpsest – the juxtaposition of past and present to embody an evolving scripture. He reproduces old master engravings, musty botanical illustrations, religious icons, cartoons and children’s colouring books, then vandalises them with painterly smears and crude commentaries. Sampled figures, minutely delineated with ultra-fine-grade brushes, are overlaid with deliberately crude oil-stick smudges and apparently arbitrary doodles. Then he goes one step further by sampling his own work with an extra layer of retrospective mischief. So, while in the past his art might have been weighed down by the spaced-out influence of the German mastermind Sigmar Polke, Godbold’s introverted reflections gain in distinction as they grow in technical elaboration.
Kerlin Gallery, Fri to 10 Oct
RC
Alice Browne, Norwich
Alice Browne’s paintings pit the tight order of minimalist repetition against the unpredictable personal dimension that comes with what’s hand drawn. She uses squares and rectangles, be that working on uniform grids of canvasses or hanging a painted paper arc from a ladder whose steps and struts echo the idea of paintings as “windows”. Her pictures depict further geometries and grids, but the perspective is comically off, the outlines hazy, the paint washy and textured. Alongside Donald Judd’s site-specific creations, she cites the faded and decaying murals of old churches and ancient Pompeii among her touchstones – images bound by real world architecture but representing imaginary space and messed by time’s anarchic hand.
Outpost, Fri to 27 Sep
SS
Nicolas Ellis, Sheffield
Nicola Ellis’s show reminds us that the post-industrial intimacy of Sheffield’s Bloc Projects gallery reflects the fact that it was once a Granton Knives grinding shed. Ambient traces remain of brickwork soot and steelwork grit, despite the gradual transformation of the area into the gentrified Cultural Industries Quarter. Accordingly, the artist’s preparatory research involved consultations with surviving local knife grinders. The outcome is sculpture that makes use of sharply filed edges and roughly welded joints. Small-scale industrial procedures are wielded to recall a rough and ready past. The title of the show – More Room For Error – follows on from that of her last, You Won’t See That Bit Anyway. In true fine art fashion, Ellis has learned how to do it all technically right in order to do it all wrong – but imaginatively so.
Bloc Projects, Sat to 12 Sep
RC
Paul Elliman, London
For this show, Paul Elliman’s award-winning photobook Untitled is transformed into a seductive video projection using 600 images culled from fashion tomes and porn. The focus is body parts, be that round white breasts, rope-bound torsos or long tanned legs. What emerges is not just a language of photography, but language itself – the former designer of avant-garde music bible The Wire has a longstanding interest in typography, and his cunningly cropped shots suggest an actual alphabet. Here, the hairy limbs and fleshy crevices are oddly intimate, restoring a human dimension to fashion photography’s factory line.
Carl Freedman, EC2, Fri to 3 Oct
SS
Richard Forster, Manchester
Forster seems unashamed to present his artistic persona as a graphic obsessive, addicted to detailed shading-in. In our super-speedy hi-tech age, Forster’s time-consuming drawings could be perceived as perverse, yet their appeal lies precisely in their creative incongruity. Most of Forster’s source material is taken from well-worn documents – a photo of the People’s Palace, Berlin, circa 1918-19, or an unidentified retro-snap of girls dancing. Forster’s immaculately sharpened pencils reproduce every grainy blip to painstakingly achieve his characteristic grey-toned “photocopy-realistic” aesthetic. The somewhat spooky effect is further captured in a series of drawings made from the artist’s own humdrum photographs of a conspicuously backwater Saltburn beach. Every sandy ridge and sea ripple is frozen in time, like a petrified ghost of its former self.
Whitworth Art Gallery, Sat to 3 Jan
RC
Barbara Freeman, Belfast
Barbara Freeman’s film installation Drifting The Bann follows the river as it wends its way from the south-east of Northern Ireland through to the north-west coast. Known for her evocative paintings and prints – which, although semi-abstract, always retain a landscape ambience – Freeman’s psycho-geographical video is further concerned with the atmosphere of places. Her camera focuses on details of the journey – a sunset-drenched hillside or a spray of wild yellow flowers set against nocturnal undergrowth. Historical facts and figures are overdubbed to deepen a sense of ambivalent nostalgia – eel fishing around Toome, decrepit oaks on Rams Island, the 1641 Irish rebellion at Portadown. Thus, moments are seen to contain past memories in a lyrically developing reverie. “Sometimes we look with our ears and listen with our eyes,” Freeman has said.
The MAC, Sat to 18 Oct
RC
Hengameh Golestan, London
Hengameh Golestan’s photos capture the events in Iran on 8 March 1979, when 100,000 women marched against a decree that would, the following day, make wearing a hijab compulsory. They are the last images of the country’s women free to dress as they wish. One of just a handful of Iranian female photographers, Golestan was later prevented from photographing “political” events. Instead, the vast archive she has since amassed chronicles women’s private lives, a world to which she was uniquely privy. A fiery introduction to this frontrunner’s fascinating work.
The Showroom, NW8, Thu to 27 Sept
SS
