Daniel Templeman, Katrina Dobbs, Ben Frost
The paintings of Ben Frost and the computer collaborations of Daniel Templeman and Katrina Dobbs are seductive. The viewer is enticed by the saturation of colour, the high gloss, the pure entertainment value. The images are clean, specious and ready to be consumed. Like the computer game in the centre of the room, in this exhibition the viewer enters a synthetic world where the game is all important. One plays the art, becomes involved in its mechanisms and searches for the energy pills, through the projection of artificial light. Rather than ignoring fashion the work aspires to it. Cloud Nine could be seen either as breaking through banality and entertainment or as being banality and entertainment.
Frost's paintings are direct, frontal. His images are selected not so much from popular culture as from the stereotypes of popular culture. They are de-contextualised, mutilated and re-formed. There are family picnics where people play cricket, or scenes of people walking to school through fantasy landscapes, all of them headless. Other works are abstractions, bold and beautiful. The paintings are flat, solid and become objects in their own right. Perhaps the most memorable image is that of the Spice Girls naked. People feel the need to label them, to figure out which Spice is which Spice. The bodies are flat and without verisimilitude, and they give viewers finally what they want, what they really really want.
In contrast, the computer prints of Daniel Templeman and Katrina Dobbs seem comparatively subtle. The inks are rich and 'residue-like' and the images fragmented and unresolvable as the super-saturation of the printing process dissolves them into the serial fuzz of (re)production. Their forms change with the viewer's focus