The Slade School of Art Fine Art Media MA/MFA Degree Show
The Slade, London, 17-25 June 2022
The outgoing Slade Fine Art Media MFA and MA students offer a large, varied degree show that spans the whole of their wing of University College London, far too much to cover in depth here. Lots of the work feels unrealised, and on balance there is more to question than to love, but there are some strong early-career artists in this cohort and occasional flashes of brilliance. Some leniency is due these students for having pushed through during times of covid . . . but not too much. These are master's degrees after all. Time to get serious.
There's a bad habit going round of balancing little knick-knacks on the edges of work, and many installations suffer from overcrowding where they might have been strong. Amidst the humming sounds and computer keyboards scattered over the floor, it's too easy to miss James Patrick Cox's artful device in which the sound of a dripping tap is relayed to a different part of the room. Similarly, Yirou Zhou arrestingly thematizes surveillance with a screen showing Google Maps footage next to a frenetic ceiling fan and headphones playing mechanical sounds, but there is no need for the other screen or the white sculpture on the floor. Also, cut all philosophical monologues. No-one's listening.
The painting is mostly disappointing: far too much slack, dreamlike, illustrative figuration. Where's the tension in that? It's as if - and this is a widespread problem today - painters can't be bothered to question their medium, and are content just to paint pretty pictures of the last dream they had or a cartoon character or something vaguely occult or whatever. These make few, if any, demands on their viewers (beyond testing their patience). Is that all painting can hope to achieve?
Not necessarily. There are a few good painters, and the strongest are doing abstraction. Phoebe Ridgway's paintings have a powerful sense of colour and exciting, unexpected compositions. Tsai Yun-Ju's have a delicate palette, largely soft pinks, which nevertheless produce immense visual force, grabbing your eyes with two hands, yanking them all over the surface, and bouncing them off the edges until you lose your sense of space, entirely at their mercy. This painter shows great technical skill and has clearly learnt the lessons of Modernism, while still feeling fresh.
A confident, exciting installation is Jo McGarry's classroom filled with giant plastic tubes attached to air pumps, which gently move and push up against you. With a nod to Martin Creed's Half the Air in a Given Space, it satirises the teacher's hot air or the stuffiness of a room full of schoolkids, with a nod to recent measures to control airflow. McGarry's signature on the whiteboard is nice and immerses you playfully in the work's fiction. On a similar theme, Yifán Hē winningly recreates an adolescent's bedroom, dimly lit and complete with dodgy wallpaper, a TV in a closet and a playable video game: art from life.
If I had a prize I'd give it to Ruby Wroe for the video 'No Longer and Not Yet', a collection of mundane episodes from the students' life at the Slade. Deadpan, students are shown doing tasks like opening windows and carrying filing cabinets down the stairs. There are lingering shots of UCL's neoclassical architectural details, and bursts of exuberant classical music give it a farcical feel. Critical, humorous and restrained, it captures the odd emptiness of many of the university's buildings, the sense of historical resonances, things suppressed, within the idiom of a cheerful infomercial. And it grows in the mind after you've left.