Cabbages! Chickens! Teeth! Cars! Eggs! Naked men down on all fours with the livestock! Mocked up posters and mocked up galleries! What's going on at Camden Arts Centre and what's going on with the Montreal born artist Allison Katz and her engaging, if slightly confusing, work?
Artery, her first solo exhibition in London, begins with a series of mocked up posters and they set the scene pretty well for what's to come. There's chickens and partially abstracted faces which seem to be among Katz's favourite themes as she aims to explore questions of identity, expression, selfhood, and voice.
Yeah, all that stuff! To what end I'm not exactly sure but the work is both compelling and visually impressive (as well as, seemingly, being untitled). Katz, we learn, treats her own life as source material and there is even a claim, possibly a true one, that her childhood home was in Finchley Road, Hampstead, Quebec. Quite a remarkable coincidence once you understand that the Camden Arts Centre is on Finchley Road, Hampstead, London.
It seems her art, and life, is a game of coincidences and parallels as well as the odd trompe l'oeil like the painting of an empty lift that has been placed not far from the actual lift in the gallery. It's gleaming, it's shiny, it's photorealist, and it, of course, doesn't function as a lift whatsoever. If anything, it's a neat twist on the theme of Duchamp's pipe which was, as we all know, not a pipe at all.
Katz appears to be asking us to make our own connections (there are only two information boards in the whole gallery, both at the start) but it's not always easy to do so. We learn that, for Katz, "surface is depth" and she uses sand and rice to make her paintings as well as fairly uninteresting plays on words (ALL IS ON is a riff on her first name and MASK stands for Ms Sarah Allison Katz, her AKA) and we're also told that the exhibition's title, Artery, refers to the work aiming to reach our hearts.
But I'm not sure it did. It pleased me and it looked nice but I'm not sure I could say it moved me. I'd need to have understood it a bit better for that. I really liked the quiet, almost lonely, canal scene, the burning heart that looked as if it could have been painted by Dorothea Tanning, and a car seen through the red tinted windows of another car but I didn't really understand why Katz had chosen these subjects.
Other than that they looked good - and that is of course fine. I particularly liked the mocked up galleries, as seen through open mouths full of jagged teeth and I had to admire the technical proficiency that allowed her to paint a selection of cabbages almost as if they were portraits of close friends. I particularly liked the painting of a cabbage that is being inspected by a shadowy, curious rather than sinister, face.
I also had to concede that I couldn't ever remember a shuttlecock featuring in any painting I'd ever seen before. I really liked Allison Katz's work, and I loved that the show ended with two lips about to kiss - a positive send off, but I didn't understand it all - and that didn't bother me as much as you might think.
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