Articula London: Paradise Garage at Eighty One

31 January - 23 February
Wednesday - Saturday 11am - 6pm & by appointment
81 Curtain Rd, Shoreditch, London EC2A 3AG

www.eighty1.co.uk

Curated by Henry Kinman, including work by: Joe Crowdy, Matthew Darbyshire, Nic Deshayes, Anthea Hamilton & Julie Verhoeven, Jack Lavender, Simon Mathers, Oliver Osborne, Myles Painter, Prem Sahib, Marianne Spurr, Jesse Wine

Not many people know that I had a past life as an interior designer. On one of the last jobs I worked on, I helped design the offices for a large international, 'hip' advertising company. There were these ‘ironic' moose sculptures, industrial brushed metal workstations, and funky curved ceiling panels. I left design because I didn’t see a future in it. Well I guess I did, but I just didn’t think I would get much satisfaction out of picking an endless stream of slightly different quirky objects, designing slightly different ‘cool’ ceiling panels and picking out slightly different ‘somewhat’ unusual (though not too much so) finishes for desk partitions.

I turned my mind away from all that stuff to become an artist but it seems to me that more and more this ‘stuff’ has followed me anyway. Time after time I go out to see ‘art’ and find a trendy decorated showroom instead, and it's worth questioning why this might be the case.

I’m in Shoreditch tonight at Eighy One with this in mind, looking at some brand new Nike sneakers presented as formalist adornment to an exclusively black and white themed conglomeration of purchased objects.

Detail of Matthew Darbyshire work

I was about to write ready-made objects, and thus contextualise it within some history of conceptual art, but it’s really not that at all. Ready-mades originally shocked and offended (think Duchamp and his fountain) and made the viewer really question the status of the art object, but everything here is seemless and tastefully matched. And against the rough concrete floors, it all looks just great.

There is very little questioning here, and to be fair the show blurb just says that the artists will ‘explore the attraction of homogeneous design and the fetishism of commercial aesthetics’, but i think words more akin to ‘regurgitate, reformat and reproduce’ seem more honest.

In a strange way there’s something quite sincere about the work in this show. There exists, you can tell, a real deep love for the material, a sentiment that the world needs to be a more aesthetically balanced and put together place. And maybe it says something about where this generation finds itself today: too busy at work in their low-paying (multiple) jobs, crushed under austerity, and with precious little energy to protest - it’s no wonder that they’re just looking for the pleasant comforts of a balanced and equilibrious home.