Exhibition Run: 21 November 1994 - Monday 10 January 1994

Artist: Elisabeth Wright, Andie Wilkinson

Curated by Giorgio Sadotti

Television – viewing from afar, two channels………… Andie Wilkinson and Elizabeth Wright.

Poisoned, contaminated, a bottled water scare. The Americans won’t drink European

water since Chernobyl. An ecological wasteland, the flickering of the artificial that is an excited gas, a fluorescent light fixture with bad nerves twitching uncontrollably. Andie Wilkinson uses the neurotic brightness of day-glo coloured plastic as a sign of the toxic, unnatural and unforgiving. A landscape painter for the nineties. She shows our fragility as we are grouped like insects and literally pinned to the wall as specimens. A trolley as waste disposal unit becomes a viral seascape of sand and detergent. Shelves of coffee and powdered milk piled like a snow capped mountain range. Spore, cake-like fragments become islands on the floor that is the sea. With imaginative and deceptively simplistic combinations of quiet materials Wilkinson creates a whole world similar in feeling to the reading of tea leaves at the bottom of a cup. Perhaps tragic at times but always tinged with humour. Remember what the dormouse said.

No thanks I’ll smoke my own. Imagine smoking a whole pack at once, chewing a stick of gum the size of a table, trying to get into a tent that can only accommodate one foot. These feelings of anxiety combined with perceptual dizziness experienced when viewing Elizabeth Wright’s work makes for a psychological thriller. The ‘twilight zone’ meets ‘Psycho’ meets ‘Bed Knobs and Broom Sticks’. Disney would have signed her up. The incredible shrinking woman, what a witch; by reducing the size of a London business pages phone book she manages to wipe off 30% of the value off the shares, reduces British Telecom’s printing costs, saves trees, lowers inflation, helps you to enter a fiction. She sneaks up on us under a cloak of invisibility that the use of the everyday, the mundane, discarded and unworthy affords her. The simple but affective strategy for her is that size is everything. She makes objects the way other people make photographs, makes fun of perceived reality . The why? word keeps jumping up and whispering delicately in your ear for the power is not only the visual skill, the surrogate made real, it is the subtlety, the conceptual shock that her ambush leaves you with. Feed your head.

A confirmation of the forthcoming century change, you’ve just entered mind fuck country. Please do not adjust your set.

GIORGIO SADOTTI