We didn’t mean to be bad kids – TV made us do it exhibits the work of ten young artists from Manchester, London and Glasgow, based on childhoods spent soaking up daytime TV, glove puppet presenters, merchandise tie-ins and mind numbing cult cartoons. The work includes sculpture, paintings, photography and installations, exploring the lasting influences of infantile popular culture on artists working now – influences that have nonetheless been turned to their advantage. As part of the new visual arts programming at Warrington, this show brings the radical and the subversive into the face of the mainstream.
The Little Artists circumnavigate the gallery space with a series of interlinked Scalextric tracks, two mini-Cooper cars driving constantly in opposite directions. Another track runs at Pyramid, Warrington’s centre for the arts, just down the road, and like the museum and art gallery part of Warrington’s expanding Cultural Quarter. The Little Artists are a cartoon of their own devising – two Manchester based artists who commodify high art, satirising like mad in the process, exploring the artist as ‘brand’.
Goldsmiths graduate Vincent James brings his speedy, fluid cartoons disconnecting objects from their original context to freewheel amidst new scenarios. Simon Woolham who studied fine art at Manchester Metropolitan University, and who now lives and works in London, occupies several antique Edmonds cases (bane of the contemporary curator’s life) with his delicate but hard-hitting carbon and paper constructions. Hinged, winged, weighted and folded, they can be tiny and fragile or as imposing as skyscraper maquettes.
More counter-culture with legendary Mancunian Grafitti boi and author of ‘A Cure for Everything’ (on sale in the museum shop), Brya Weths, whose painted installations bring the marks, tags and doodles of the street and the skatepark into the gallery. Having spent his formative years splashing his ‘%@!$£’ tag over everything in sight, he’s developed a style fed by Electro and 1980s pop music such as Salt ‘n’ Pepa, out of the old illegality of the now removed ‘We didn’t start the fire’ that used to adorn Piccadilly Gardens’ phoneboxes, or the immortal line ‘The North Will Rise Again’ that once festooned the side of H&M in celebration of the post-Millennium repostitioning of the city of Manchester.
David Hancock is a photorealist of the highest calibre, developing his work from intense portraits of teenagers and young people lounging, despairing or blanking out amidst their cluttered rooms, into new renditions of PreRaphaelite compositions brought out of Victoriana into the twenty-first century, filled with neo-Gothic flourishes and haunting colour schemes.
Dawn Woolley’s Doll’s House series satirises the gender-specific nature of kids’ toys by examining the social construction of gender as a form of learned behaviour that occurs during childhood – children mimicking their parents to form socially acceptable stereotypical roles. Cut-out self portraits are placed inside a doll’s house and are photographed. The dolls are all Dawn Woolley, whether male or female and here the actual doll’s house is on display as well as the photography.
Hannah Wooll trained at the Royal Academy Schools. Her fairytale gothic paintings display an interest in the frivolity of over-iced cakes, ballerinas in pink shoes and fluffy tutus, little girls in ribbons and bows, over-sugary images that could very well induce nausea. These paintings throw off an underlying element of malevolence and melodrama along with their sickening pastels and simplistic arrangements, dancers on top of stacked-up cake pedestals painted in chocolate box modulations and precarious compositional techniques.
Pamela So notes the fact that social workers involved with Britain’s Chinese population are dealing with more problems associated with the breakdown of family values. She photographs sets of androgenous Chinese rag dolls to chart the progress of a relationship from seduction and tenderness to breakdown and abuse. Her preoccupation to date has been with the deconstruction of her own history as Scottish-born Chinese and she seeks a balance in her work between past and present.
Jim Medway, represented by Paul Stolper, shows his ongoing influences, drawing on Richard Scarry illustrated books and several decades of cat-based Disney output. His style is off-beat, funny and cute but there are sufficient underlying messages about how we judge or view the hooded lads at the darkened bus stop and the characters who hang out on the estates to fit in perfectly with the ‘Bad Kids’ ethos. Anna Mitchell (whose work was presented in Bloomberg New Contemporaries last year) also refers to the books and cartoons of schooldays, her monochrome photographs bringing to mind the opening credits of Bagpuss, and permeated with the quiet dusty quality of distant childhood memories.