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It is hard not to take the title of Stephen Birch's installation Civic Minded literally when viewing it at Gallery 4A. Positioned right in the centre of a city that is gearing up for the Olympics with unprecedented public works, the space positively vibrates with the sound of jackhammers and trucks. The ambient noise provides an unintentional yet perfect backdrop to Birch's work, which has the silent, sinister quality of a faceless municipal bureaucracy.
The show consists simply of two painted fiberglass tree trunks reaching from floor to ceiling. At the base of each trunk is a pair of black leather shoes. The shoes are positioned so that the trunks face each other: one front on, the other with one foot slightly turned out, as if in wary contemplation. One can only wonder at the conversation. At first glance, the work acts as a neat visual joke, a Disneyesque humanisation of an inanimate object. When time is spent with the work, however, its details begin to take hold in a slowly unfolding trajectory of destabilisation.
The initial question might be a Platonic one. How do we know that these are really trees? The fibreglass tubes, while resembling tree trunks and obviously painted to look that way, lack any further signifiers, such as leaves, or twigs. The tops of the trunks don't quite reach the ceiling, nor do the bottoms quite reach the floor (this actually intensifies their effect; it is as if the trunks are wearing the shoes and are capable of sudden movement, rather than the shoes having sprung from earthbound roots). At both the top and the base, the trunk ends abruptly; no bushy canopy, no muddy radix