David Sherry

About

I've invited David Sherry to come down from Glasgow with a number of works, most of which I haven't seen. Drawing, sculptures, videos and I think he is doing a performance on opening night as well. He sends this picture and mentions that in Northern Ireland if you turn and wear your coat inside out you won't be brought under the fairies spells. This might be useful if you pass that blackthorn bush in the middle of a field in the Mourne mountains which is surrounded by a small ring of boulders: the fairies are said to come out from under the boulders and take advantage of any unsuspecting right-way-round coat wearers. Are the folkways of our daily routine much like such superstitious rituals? Pig headed and pixy-led we may be, but they form, as designs for living, a set of small tools which bind us as a community. The artist David Sherry uses these tools earnestly, but against the grain, and with Keatonesque results. Some can converse with ease and authority about spaces they do not occupy; Sherry shows signs of trouble mastering his own environment and simple social situations as he conscientiously attempts his way with a conflation of blatant inadequacy and disarming optimism. Later reading, Yeats's Second Coming, 'the best lack all convictions, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity', I ponder that art has never had it so good. And meanwhile up north, in the land of flat property prices and rising ukip; the dispiriting odour of lingering despair. Sherry's work does not let us off with grand channel-surfing narratives or the aesthetics of esthetics in virtual gloss. But chipping away, from the slabs of drab, tiny re-considerations in flights of fancy, it digs up magic realism. news of the world in Deptford exists as a curator's studio, to allow works to be looked at in a research and development setting.