Trouble in Toyland

I've just come back from Brunswick Council gallery and their two current exhibitions: a groups show called Trouble in Toyland and Keiko Murakami’s Kizuguchi. I have to say, I was a little disappointed by both.

The stand out artist was Van Sowerwine, with 3 huge photographs and an amusing stop motion animation. The photographs are dark and menacing, each featuring a single toy in a human like fashion that stop you in your tracks. Sowerwine was also the artist behind Play With Me, an installation I saw at the CCP in 2002 which I loved. She captures disturbing moments in both her animations and images with leave the veiwer just that little bit unsettled.

Anna Hoyle exhibited tiny glittery inks like watercolours, little scenes of animals racing around. Although techically they were amazing, I felt that the words she added around and through the work only really detracted from it. They were an unnessecery speedhump to enjoying the work.

Other work was a cute sculpture by Martine Corompt The Anxious cat, Christopher Langton’s towering inflatable Captain America like Plastic Man and Michael Doolan’s metallic looking ceramic toy figures.

Curatorially, I wondered how the art interacted with each other. Sowerine's work was in one corner. Hoyle's work occupied a little nook of it's own. Doolan's work inhabited a glass case, totally cut off from the gallery space or the other work. I felt that every grouping of work was separate to every other, rather than the exhibition being one coherent whole. And that might be partly the odd shape to the gallery itself. You can't really flow around a room that has a doorway to another gallery in the middle of one of the walls and a nook like space attached to another wall. I do think that almost all spaces can be worked with, but there was something a little stilted in the presentation of this show, which was a shame.

The second exhibition was Kizuguchi, which is explained in the catolouge as "the exhibition’s title ‘kizuguchi’, means a “wound or cut to the body” in Japanese." Most of the work was a gothic lolita style doll figure looking out of the frame with a wound somewhere on her body. The same pose and the same face just painted in different colours seemed a little lazy to me. Unlike, say, Hazel Doony's Dangerous Career Babes, where the exact same pose but different props and costume are utalised to great effect, Murakami's paintings arn't different enough to be different, but arn't similar enough to work as an exploration of pose vs props. The other problem with most of her works is that they're very, very similar to a lot of other work I've seen in this style. This might be because she's on the cutting edge of cool and popular or it might be that everybody's doing it.

She did have some lino prints of a weird shape that stood in for a head, with a weeping eye and tiny bodies, and I thought they worked much better than her other works. They conveyed emotion without being overly cheesy and they showed a well thought out use of colour and shape. It would have been great to see more of these