No Photography Please
Power to the pinhole
Opening on June 3, the London College of Communication, BA Photography degree show offered a refreshing change. What in previous years had become a slick affair, with polished yet often sterile work, saw a move towards the sculptural. Beyond the inevitably disparate nature of any degree show, this year’s shows contained some surprising highlights.
Past the gaudy, Top Shop-esk shantytown that the incumbent management of LCC have erected next to the famously beautiful elephant and castle roundabout you are greeted by huge block text declaring ‘POWER’. Remembering that this is primarily a media school, this excessive branding seems understandable.
Despite heavy security and festival style wristbands, the collage’s Upper Street gallery is impressive, like the bastard child of the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, you are greeted with an intriguing mix of work. Sara Naim’s seductive large format photographs of skins cells share space with Charlotte Draycott’s painterly studies of legal professionals. Both works pays homage to the tactile visceral beauty of a good photographic print. While good photographs in a photography show is a pleasant surprise the degree to which this batch of students have raised the bar or pushed the boundaries or moved some sort of metaphorical object is genuinely note worthy.
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Fan Chon Hoo’s work traverses photography and sculpture. With a subtle cultural critique Chon Hoo prints Chinese style cyanotype images taken around the UK onto small models of aristocratic household objects.
In a small room off the main exhibition space, a film by Jon Nash shows a billboard shaped object being carried through a cloud of smoke. This is accompanied by a concrete sculpture and images of empty advertising hoardings made across Russia. “I’ve often felt it’s the artist’s job to instil the symbols around which society unfolds”, explained the artist. “Much like soviet statues, billboards have a monumental function even if it is just the buying and selling of crap.”
Closing later this week the usual degree show mix of rubbish was elevated by those works that approached the photographic through non-photographic means.
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