Brian Griffiths. No No to Knock-Knocks

About

Appearing in a series of sculptural situations, often on the point of collapse, or running through some seemingly meaningless protocol, Griffiths’ creation is a tragi-comic figure: a naked, puppet-like Caucasian male who seems not to know that his strings – if they ever held him up – have now been decisively cut. Bald, blind, and with his pink paintwork and wooden body showing signs of wear and tear, this little performer clunks through his part.

Three canvas works are suspended from the gallery ceiling, and slump onto its floor. Rough approximations of the human form, their large size, grey pigment, and fabric construction is an abrupt shift in scale, color and material. Considering the two types of figurative sculpture that cohabit in the exhibition space, we might ask ourselves ‘who is dreaming whom?’

With its percussive title, which suggests the rattling of wooden limbs, and appears to prohibit that most tiresome of comic routines, the knock-knock joke, Griffiths’ exhibition is an exploration, as he puts it, of ‘objects as fictional tools’. Are these works sculptures playing at being puppets, or puppets playing at being sculptures?  Then there is the question of who is pulling their (absent) strings. 

Griffiths’ not-quite-puppets are ambiguous performers, eliciting both laughter and sympathy. Material objects rather than living bodies, they are fated to take to the stage despite the implausible ‘woodenness’ of their acting’, to communicate only through their own dull matter.

A publication accompanies the exhibition, with a new text by Tom Morton.