Jyll Bradley, Serge Kliaving and Michael Landy each show one work. Landy’s coup is his use of artificial grass – a material fascinatingly tactile but repellent, redolent both of domesticity and tackiness – to model in miniature something grand, a mountain range perhaps. The grass is wrapped and draped round nine cones – witty and intriguing social comment being muted. In Kliaving’s acrylic painted panels, on the other hand, the politics does battle with the art – deliberately. Nine panels record recent violence in Northern Ireland alternating with ironically sweet advertisements and arty statements. As a final comment, the tenth declares ‘ART CAN MAKE YOU LIVE FOREVER DISNEYLAND’ – a consciousness raiser. Jyll Bradley’s piece consists of two cinema style lightboxes with a photograph and text about a child whose parents offere to take her to one of two plays. She tries to decide by fantasising around the titles. Gentle, nostalgic, affecting but robust, its strategies – the suggestion of autobiography and the placing of the viewer between slightly different photographs of children happily agog at a spectacle – create a human presence and suggest ideas beyond those of the story. Bradley’s pairing of the physical and the psychological is almost perfect – delicious.
David Lillington