Jamie Shovlin: Aggregate

London based Jamie Shovlin last showed work in Scotland as part of the
Beck's Futures exhibition at The Centre for Contemporary Art in Glasgow.
Here the Talbot Rice Gallery hosts a solo show of new works by Shovlin, commissioned by four UK venues - Aggregate is a touring exhibition that collects new works as it travels. The show is split up into four sections: Maps, Jigsaws, Books and Birds, each as monotonous and everyday as the other.

The display takes on the form of a museum installation and faux-educational
platform; everything is gridded and mapped out. The repartition and
unforgiving nature of the presentation, source material and research tools
has been personalised with the introduction of observation as a hobby. The
exhibition takes the pastimes of bird watching and jigsaws to an
extreme level, representing them in an obsessive compulsive style - but the show lacks the ability to draw the viewer in.

The introduction of the artist's mother's hobby of bird watching - whilst completing jigsaw after jigsaw - adds an emotional edge to the original research based exhibits; blurring the lines between human observation and scientific fact. The artist's mother represents observer and creator, as Darwin is in The Origin of Species - but do we take the mother's notes as fact, or do we accept Darwin's observations?

Shovlin uses meticulous methods to display personal insights, as well as
information taken from The Origin of Species. The use and clear
appreciation of research systems becomes the structure holding the four
sections together, however there is also mockery of them and our blind
acceptance of their content. This body of work is difficult to interact
with and aesthetically does not draw the viewer in. The observations and
vast accumulation of research material indulge in, and isolate, themselves.
The artist is playing a game of solitaire and does not seem too keen to let
anyone else join in.