This combination of 'playschool fabrications' avoids a tiresome and increasingly familiar Pop framing. Curator Helen Nicholson skirts those discussed-to-death faux-naif pop pleasures that have accompanied work by Mikala Dwyer, Kathy Temin et al through the last decade. She concentrates instead on the conceptual legacy of these artists' work, along with the often overlooked relation between modernism and the nineteenth-century invention and training of children's art.
Chris McAuliffe's speculative essay takes a different tack, asking why '60s anti-formalist practices have persisted so long after the demise of modernism's cultural hegemony. Do the undisciplined processes and domestic materials found in this show still signify market resistance, decades after conceptual, feminist, punk and grunge informality have been bypassed or incorporated into our art institutions? Maybe, suggests McAuliffe, while noting that these artists do not de-skill and dematerialise the art object in the face of reification and commodification as they did during the '60s and '70s. The serial work and installations in this exhibition simply theatricalise late modern practices, maintaining a wary regard for the politics of institutional display.
Elizabeth Gower has spanned these decades, along with Robert Rooney and John Nixon. Gower's sophisticated multiple series underline the decorative dimension of this post-60s drama. Her collaged disks also hark back to the Encyclopedic aspirations of the Port-Royale scholars, Hoch and Schwitters' puns-on-paper, as well as nodding in the direction of Miriam Schapiro's '70s analytic needlework. At times Gower's crafty refinement undercuts the show's premises regarding the politics of finish; however there are good arguments for virtuosity in play here, accentuated in the exquisite Generis series. While it is undoubtedly good, there is a lot of Gower's work on display.
It overshadows quieter pieces by