South London Gallery, SE5
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Jerwood Space, SE1
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With Freud and Hockney prompting ticket scrambles and Damien Hirst’s retrospective set to open at Tate Modern, there is much emphasis this year on the biggest names in recent British art but a trio of exhibitions has just opened featuring some of the most promising newcomers to the scene.
Katie Paterson addresses the infinite cosmos with a conceptual approach that belies the scale of her subjects. Every day at 1pm a cannon is fired in the gallery, propelling confetti into the space. This is 100 Billion Suns (2011), in which each confetti dot represents a Gamma-ray Burst (GRB) — explosions in distant galaxies, 100 billion times brighter than the sun and observable from earth.
Visit at other times and you see the confetti, colour matched by Paterson to images of the GRBs, forming a constellation on the gallery floor, while surrounding photographs reflect the work’s incarnation amid Venetian streets and canals at last year’s Biennale. Paterson has also worked with scientists to film darkness at the edge of universe and written letters marking the death of stars — an original thinker, she reinforces how unimaginable these cosmic events are amid everyday life.
Alice Channer’s themes are closer to home — the body, fabrics which clothe it and the space and objects surrounding it. Her latest show orchestrates sculptures using the full extent of the gallery — digital prints of drapery from classical sculptures fill banners stretching from floor to ceiling, while along the walls are frames based on Yves Saint Laurent’s drawings for his Le Smoking jackets and wrapped in spandex.
On the floor are sculptures in marble, metal and elastic which suggest deconstructed reclining figures. The works echo each other — a print of smoke rings on one of the banners evokes the curved metal in the sculptures and rings of elastic which protrude from the walls. Channer mixes a fluent sense of design and shape with a grasp for throwing materials together.
Tomorrow Never Knows is the inaugural Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella award in which four relatively recently graduated artists show prototype films made with £4,000 they received for being shortlisted. Emma Hart’s video and animation mash-up involving the quiz show Blockbusters and the Bond film Moonraker, containing animated Post-it notes and scenes of Peckham streets, is bonkers but brimming with ideas, while works by Corin Sworn, Ed Atkins and Naheed Raza are slower paced, and more studious. Two artists will be selected to receive £20,000 to make finished films.
Katie Paterson until April 28 (020 7495 5050, haunchofvenison.com). Alice Channer until May 13 (020 7703 6120, south londongallery.org). Tomorrow Never Knows until April 22 (020 7654 0171, tomorrowneverknows.org.uk)
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