UNSEEN or neglected parts of the environments around them was the starting point for the four artists exhibiting in Open Eye’s first group show since the move to its new Mann Island location earlier this year.
It’s an interesting spot for such a subject given that visitors to the nearby Pier Head are being forced to look again at Liverpool’s most famous scene as it shifts and changes with new buildings, including Open Eye’s own.
French artist Nicolas Milhé opens the show, raising a cliched image of an alpine landscape from picture postcard status by turning it into a 3m-long sculpture.
Viewed from behind it reveals itself as a section of battlement, with a medieval-style arrow slit – discovering that you were, in theory at least, vulnerable to attack while enjoying a comfortingly familiar piece of scenery is quite disturbing.
New father Pietro Mattioli explores the nighttime landscape located within the reach of his child’s baby monitor. In the Swiss photographer’s series Two Thousand Light Years from Home, every day objects become otherworldly, the natural world has an unreal tinge, while manmade items seem part of nature.
Rebecca Lennon’s strangely hypnotising video work, Uncomfortable Silence i, shows her ritualistically spraypainting rubbish found in the gutter, while transforming fast food wrappers and broken hangers into artefacts or sculptures.
The UK artist’s audio piece, This is What They Built the Ship With, is brilliantly witty. She has run the call of seagulls through auto-tune software, used by the music industry to “perfect” singers’ voices. The result is a sinister burst of clashing notes – part-fanfare, part painful cry – that questions man’s compulsion to interfere with nature.
Finally, what you see is not what you get in Brighton-based recent graduate Alison Stolwood’s large-scale photographs, which manipulate outdoor scenes to make the viewer look again.
Running alongside Still Outside (or Unexplained) is an archive exhibition of Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculpture series, made in the late-1990s.
The Austrian artist, whose followers include Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, toys with the concept of sculpture as an elevated art form by asking his models to pose spontaneously with everyday items.
In the 18 photographs on display, they are shown apparently squashed under suitcases, partially hidden inside cardboard boxes and, in Wurm’s case, with pens stuck inside his nostrils.
It’s funny at first, but very soon starts to feel menacing.
Laura Davis
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