Page 118 - Art Review

Ad Minoliti, Aleksandra Domanović, DIS, Lynn Hershman Leeson,
Vikky Alexander, Wang Newone

Project Native Informant, London 2 November – 9 December

‘The future’s not what it used to be,’ Robert The work of onetime Pictures Generation replacing the cartoonishly heteronorma-
Graves and Laura Riding quipped 80 years artist Vikky Alexander offers another tive inhabitants of Just what is it that makes
ago. Billed as an exhibition ‘on gender, intriguing historical position, represented today’s homes so different, so appealing? (1956)
domesticity and technology in the present’, in the form of two mid-2000s digital collages with genderless geometric presences.
this sparse show – comprising just nine on canvas (2006’s Rising River and 2007’s Green Whatever else the dialogue between these
works by six artists – offers a chance to Lake). Both depict domestic interiors, unreal works raised, one resounding impression
consider futures past, as well as those still in their cheerful sterility, with the floating, is of how closely aligned gender and domestic
to come. Take Lynn Hershman Leeson’s weightless quality of buildings designed space have been and remain: how when
Digital Venus #1: After Titian (1996): a slight in SketchUp (the looming presence of the we talk about the home, we are still in some
work by a great artist, this colour print sees titular bodies of water, stretching across each sense talking about the feminine (however
the exposed flesh of Titian’s Venus of Urbino depicted room’s floor-to-ceiling windows, construed). It is striking, then, that the instal-
(1538) – itself a radical innovation in its time, further unmoors the scenes’ stability). They lation here by DIS, Sleep Mode (2017), while
pioneering the presentation of the nude are charming, quietly unsettling things, yet drawing its title from IT, takes the form
in a commonplace domestic setting, unsup- when compared to much of the flood of ‘post- of a videowork mimicking cable TV channel
ported by mythological allusion – overlaid Internet art’ that would follow a few years later, hopping – with snatches of family scenes,
with circuit board. Made one year before the also strikingly traditional, feeling as close in women jogging and formal public apologies
first Cyberfeminist International, the work’s spirit to Patrick Caulfield as, say, Cory Arcangel. – played from a fullscale double bed, in
thin, two-dimensional imagination of the There are further Pop echoes, too, in which the viewer can settle. Evoking a slightly
merging of living subject and machine two contemporary works, drawn from Ad hysterical version of a ‘duvet day’ at home,
seems almost quaint: it reminded me a little Minoliti’s Queer Deco series. Displayed against the work immerses the viewer in a gendered
of the cover of Add N to (X)’s 1998 album, a lozenge-shaped orange wall vinyl (Puppy, world of comfort and soft feelings. What DIS
On the Wires of Our Nerves – in which a synth 2017), the kitsch fantasy space of Queer Deco do is often treated as cultural prophecy; here,
deck emerges from a woman’s bloody (Visiona 1) and Queer Deco (Total Furnishing Unit) I’d say the prediction is: the future is, in some
chest – minus the deadpan humour. (both 2017) reek of Richard Hamilton, but sense, female. Matthew McLean

Installation view, 2017. Courtesy the artists and Project Native Informant, London

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