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Story by Jack Foley |
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A NEW exhibition at The Hoxton Distillery, entitled Now You Don't, features a collection of painting, photography and video by the artists Richard Couzins, Christopher Lee and Carly Rogers.
The event begins with Richard Couzins' new video which takes the punctuation qualities of emblematic still-shots of TV soaps and sit-coms and turns them in on themselves (an example is pictured above). Couzins exploits the rhythmic possibilities of editing and its fragmenting effect on narrative using voiceover-text-image conjuring.
Christopher Lee, meanwhile, has made a frieze of photographs of toys on identical
backgrounds. Painted dots on the surface of the prints cover the image area
of the toys - their familiar outline just recognisable.
Lee is interested in material contrasts: the irregularly applied matt paint
partially obliterating both the image and the gloss of the surface; the comforting
and familiar rendered indistinct.
Carly Rogers' large-scale photographs show the basic accoutrements of a magic
act. The objects are arranged as they would be in a catalogue shot. The nature
of the imagery combines an awkward vulnerability, inherent in the objects
and their construction, with an authority and confidence created by the way
in which they have been photographically recorded and presented.
What you see is what you get, but it is not enough. When the cards are on
the table - and face up - what is left but hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades
and the possibilities of the game.
According to the Hoxton's website, 'all the work has a deceptive simplicity,
a disingenuous minimalism'.
It adds: "The basic and insignificant (the cardboard box, the toy, the
suburban house) thwart indepth analysis, evoking a kind of pathos, leaving
us free to enjoy the elegant arrangements, rhythms, and surfaces."
Now You Don't - April 12th - May 5, 2002: Private view: Thursday, April
11
The Hoxton Distillery, Above The Macbeth, 70 Hoxton Street, London, N1