PLEASE DRIVE SLOWLY THROUGH OUR VILLAGE

About

Dominic Beattie, Tom Dale, Annabel Elgar, Matt Golden, Angie Hicks, Sean Parfitt and Simon Willems Curated by Simon Willems Please drive slowly through our village brings together a number of artists exploring the representation of ‘support' and ‘structure' as a failed, dysfunctional and collapsible proposition. Working within a paradoxical remit, they share the need to suggest an unworkable solution. Function and permanence becomes a misnomer, where the architectural model can be read as a licence to present its own shortcomings. What we are left with is a playful dynamic that recognises the value of vulnerability and failure as integral elements within a metaphorical and conceptual framework of making. The familiar and the strange work in tandem here to confound any assumptions the viewer might place in the show's logic and construction. A rack of climbing wall sections slumps pathetically in the corner, peppered with the garish grippings of a play-dough riot. An absurdist critique on a modernist agenda, we are forced to interrogate these works, as they map out a broken terrain of arrested development. The wry sentiment of the title creates a vacuum of burgeoning wit gently gathering pace. A skeletal assemblage of weathered picture frames reconfigured into a chair sits complete with a fractured portrait. There is a tension between convenience and obsolescence in the various pieces: A bread castle, the clichéd ingredient of prison sculpture, killing time, spars out with the reversed re-enactment of a smashed iron, cast and documented with outmoded film and graphics. Please drive slowly through our village offers up an interesting trajectory, carving out a territory less concerned with airbrushed results than a leaking process.