Studio Projects 22 & 23 @ Market Gallery

The two concurrent studio projects at Market Gallery this autumn address how we represent reality. There is something of the slavish will to reproduce our surroundings in all its intricate hyperreality in these two large-scale installations. They contain the very futility of the Sisyphean act of replicating the world around us, and hold up a mirror to our ineffectuality in the face of nature.

Firstly, Kari Stewart covers an entire wall with an image of what looks like a rippling sea or a rolling desert. Painstakingly reproduced in graphite or charcoal, the image goes slightly off kilter as the surface undulates to the right. This clear distortion of the picture plane seems to reference the original image, perhaps a photograph, from which the likeness is taken. It wants to expose its irreality, that it is a representation of a representation.

Next door Kate V Robertson has installed a huge boulder in the centre of the room. Grey and craggy it sits stout and inert; how it got there is little understood. Wedged between floor and ceiling, its muted tones complement the gallery’s subdued interior. On circling the work one begins to see the flaws in the rock’s surface, that like Stewart’s work Robertson’s rock is an outright fake, brazenly flaunting itself as a forgery.

What's more, Robertson’s sculpture brings to light the ongoing crisis within art, that we can no longer represent the world by appealing to outmoded notions of reality. She seems to illustrate the very distance between the world and our representations. Is it perhaps too pretentious to suggest that here lies the inherent sadness of the human condition: the insurmountable gap between us and the world around us? [Andrew Cattanach]