Spring 2010 Exhibition @ Axolotl Gallery

The Axolotl Gallery holds a deceptively sugary appeal from Dundas Street; its bright purple shop front displays colourful, surreal paintings promising an array of delectable, cultural sweets for passing dilettantes. The interior, reminiscent of a boutique, is open and uncluttered yet holds various separate spaces to discover unique treasures, trinkets and memories.

The work that most pertains to this twee, knick-knack feel (whilst simultaneously undermining its apparent light-heartedness) is Sarah Wilson’s elegy to her adoptive parents through sculpture and installation. This includes found sentimental objects – such as ticket stubs, horse shoes, figurines, badges and condoms – encased and displayed in small boxes of resin. These intensely personal curios are arranged and fossilised to form new narrative meanings, the stand-alone piece being the half-encased work shoes of Wilson’s father, visually arresting as the thick, translucent resin distorts the worn texture of the leather, evoking a strange transformation of mundane objects into haunted relics and the absurdity of simple human endeavour in the face of mortality.

Such musings on subjectivity and temporality, alongside lovingly grotesque investigations of human bodies, form the dominant thematic arc at Axolotl this spring: notably, Sarah Green’s carnivalesque meditations on bulbous faces; Steven Hendry’s paintings of solemn, disaffected human figures cradling guns and Michael Wildman’s photographical examinations of nudes à la Auguste Rodin’s sculpture The Crouching Woman. Occasionally overly sentimental or foppish in form, some works may appeal more than others but ultimately the Axolotl gallery is a fine place to meditate on art for an hour or two. [Rachel Bowles]