THE VERNACULAR

Jake Clark, Blaise Drummond, Mandy Hudson, Jeff McMillan

8 July - 6 August 2005

The title of this exhibition means the ‘local style’. In this context it applies to the architecture of suburbia. Mainly post 1950’s single storey houses or low-rise apartment blocks, e.g. buildings with hard lines and no frills. This show is a gathering of artists who take this subject as a starting point, using the idiosyncracies of this vernacular. From the repetitive sameness of cul-de-sacs to the idea of this kind of building being a generic or cartoon version of a house. What links all of these artists is a notion of human presence being invoked without depicting any actual figures.

Jake Clark makes small oil paintings of bungalows and seaside architecture. He uses layers of 1960’s vinyl and different languages of painting to create an abstract ground. This is then superimposed with a photograph of a building. He uses strong sunlight to depict a hallucinatory place.

Blaise Drummond constructs large-scale collage paintings of modernist type architecture within natural settings. He uses different materials, like ink bleeding into the canvas, thick blobs of paint and hard-edged depictions of buildings. For this exhibition Drummond is made new works on paper.

Mandy Hudson made some paintings for this exhibition based on details of suburbia. Looking at patios, windows and houseplants. She uses a realist style with a strong sense of place’ cropping the pictures in a photographic manner.

Jeff McMillan finds assembled cardboard boxes and submerges them into containers full of oil paint. The paint then dries leaving a very thick coating on the sides of the box. Hung on the wall they take on a house like quality, referring to balconies or dwellings seen from above.

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