Clutching my invitation to the Botanists of the Asphalt private view, I almost walked past the crowded bar near the Old Street roundabout before I realised that this was the place. By day, the City Arts & Music Project (CAMP) is a chilled-out café cum gallery, by night a throbbing bar. It opened two months ago and provides an alternative space to exhibit artists’ work.
The private view was packed with a trendy Shoreditch crowd and not a suit in sight. The bar manager told me that all the events have been very popular but despite the location it is not a place where City workers go. Not such a bad thing, I thought to myself.
CAMP’s first art show was inspired by the idea of Baudelaire’s flâneur, with the artists exploring what attracts, repulses and stirs them about the city.
A flâneur-type figure features in David London’s video A Part Apart, which can be viewed through a red or a blue screen. It follows a man on his wanderings through the city – some of it was shot close by. Some of the images are quite beautiful, but I failed to see how viewing the video through colour filters adds anything to the ‘immersive experience’ that the L.A. artist wanted to create.
The bar was dissected by coloured woolen threads – David MacDiarmid’s Geometry of Space (pictured above) – that created a meandering route around the space and invited the viewer to follow it. A nice intervention in the space.
Two other works stood out in this show: Wayne Chisnall’s The City sculpture and Aisling Roycroft’s light boxes. Chisnall’s towering wooden piece is made up of tiny display cases and cabinets made from found materials like skulls, insects and fossils, a kind of modern cabinet of curiosities. Or a nightmarish vision inspired by Jorge Luis Borges.
He explains that much like the inhabitants of a big city, each compartmentalised environment plays out its own narrative, seemingly oblivious to that of its neighbour. Apparently the piece is worth £30,000! It dates back to 1999. Chisnall has made several similar works such as Book Tower.
Roycroft also works with found objects and scrap materials. Her light boxes are made from old windows behind which she put bits of lace – domestic objects found in the public realm. It is impossible to see inside those slightly seedy ‘windows’ and to find out who lives behind, good burghers or more dubious characters.
I also liked Kerim Aytac’s photos. Highlighting the absence of people, they are shots of traces left by humans in the urban landscape. One person that stepped into a shot has been wiped out. Chisnall presents the photos as crime scenes where no obvious crime has been committed. It is hard to piece the fragments back together, the story will always remain incomplete.
The show was curated by Stephanie Pochet, a researcher on the South Bank Show (which is sadly coming to an end soon).
Botanists of the Asphalt runs until 5 January.
The City Arts & Music Project, 70-74 City Road, London EC17 2BJ
