Sorcha Dallas

Alex Frost continues his crafty take on minimalism at Changing Room. ‘1973’ tells you the artist’s vintage and hints at the possible source of some of the inspiration of the gridded drawings he has been making for the last couple of years, 1973 was when Chuck Close began his dot drawing portraits and the year Westworld, in which the point of view of the man machine is in Pixelvision, was made. It was also when Sadie Benning, who uses a Fisher Price Pixelvision camera for her autobiographical filmworks, was born. She states that people are inherently fragmentary, the fragments in turn making up a whole that is far more complex than mainstream media tends to deal with effectively.

Frost’s ingenious Pixelvision drawings are made up of a series of crosses, lines squares and circles derived from knitting patterns. In his hands it is like a machine code or an equation. These representational drawings have moved on from portraiture and are now mapping his studio – slides on a table, an accidental spillage, some flowers.

The ceramic vases on plinths seem everyday at first, until you appreciate that they are made to a template of the artist’s face. The figurative element lies not in the artwork itself, but in the void space of the silhouette. They are rotating ever so slowly, adding an additional charm – these still lives aren’t quite still and are machine operated. Alex Frost’s remains on the enigmatic side of puzzling in a clever and beautiful display.