Thursday 7 February 2013

Jay Gun / Hello Friend

On Tuesday night I went to the private viewing of the new combined exhibition at the WW Gallery.

Jay Rechsteiner is a Swiss national living in London. His half of the exhibition is "Jay Gun: The Most Dangerous Man on the Planet" and his exhibition mocks the fetishism of guns, particularly in American culture. I was prepared to find it a bit sanctimonious, but after chatting with Jay, I found that inside he still considers himself a little boy who likes to play with guns. ArseAnal's video clip probably only needs "Yakkety Sax" over the top to make it into a Benny Hill-level spoof and he has even brought a BB-gun to the exhibition for people to shoot.

I enjoyed the workmanship and the humour (and the chat with the artist!) but the art didn't really speak to me.

Moving over to Siobhan Barr's exhibition, "Hello Friend", I was much more engaged. Siobhan's work is very much my idea of fun, based on her experiences of dealing with spam, and using Google auto-complete.

Witty, clever, well-researched and most of all, very, very funny, I was once again inspired to buy a piece (and maybe even two!) as they were so apposite to my life.

Since we all spend our lives dealing with google and spam and the vicissitudes of the Internet, her work is both current yet somehow timeless. Even when the Google auto-completes move on, we will still all understand and get the humour of these pieces.

I think it's fair to say that the WW Gallery have a winner on their hands with this exhibition. Some of the art is in the "very affordable" category and I'd be amazed if some of the stuff there doesn't speak to you.

Go and see it!

More here. And here.

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