Sorcha Dallas

By reducing colour to shades of grey and form to line, an air of seriousness falls over the Transmission Gallery. The walls are gunmetal, the floor is battleship and the gallery becomes a sterile yet seductive showroom. Berlin-based Henrik Olesen’s silver exhibition cases add to the feeling of measured examination by presenting his collages ‘1935, 1922, 2003’ like manipulated evidence. His artworks reinvests Max Ernst’s ‘La femme des 100 tetes’, tying images of queer BDSM (bondage/domination/sadism/masochism) into the knotted aesthetic. Homoerotic desire is spliced with artistic volition and the collages come to resemble serious but erotic bouquets – Rodchenko’s photomontages with an air of sex and violence.

Kate Davis reduces her already refined aesthetic further, subtracting the emotional effect that her previous anthropomorphic forms, bruised with ripe colour, had on the viewer’s eye. Pencil and etched lines scratch at the subject and the surface of the paper, yet a soft, brushed pelt seems to cover and skim her forms.

The figure in ‘Player (first act)’, 2005, is buckled over a plane that juts into his solar plexus and the edge of the paper. His head is surrounded by a halo that mirrors the steering wheel attached to the wall under the print, possibly alluding to the source of his catatonic state – a car crash trauma or saintly ecstasy? Davis gently but firmly demonstrates that the movement between inside and out, subject and object can be a violent convulsion with the viewer as witness.