After showing a series
of handmade street vending tables laden with the
unsellable at this year's Venice Biennale,
Cheyney Thompson (US) has installed 60
paintings around three walls of Sutton Lane's gallery
space for his first UK show. The exhibition references
the gamut of art historical genres and specifically
Gericault's masterwork The
Raft of the Medusa, although
the fragmentary nature of the installation recalls more
vividly Gericault's infamous studies of
severed heads and limbs. Combinations
of wood, planks, plywood and bricks in a seemingly
meaningless and endless process of construction or
deconstruction could represent the raft, a gallows or
canvas supports. Among these disconnected forms are a
handful of more formal paintings. Hung low on the wall,
a cardboard box overflows with everyday rubbish and a
few Polaroids of sections of a male body. Two stone
cupids holding cornucopia, the horn of plenty, occupy
symmetrically the bottom corners or the gallery's far
wall. Thompson relates the scandal of the
Medusa to current US foreign policy.
However, the exhibition, formally at least, seems to
allude to a situation even closer to home where the
fragmentation of capitalist society allows overflowing
plenty to occupy literally the same space as the seedy
detritus Thompson finds spilling out on to the streets
of New York.
NB: Show ends Thu 27/11.
