Benefitting from excellent natural dayight, a large, open-plan layout and a central City location, this not-for-profit gallery is located on the second floor of Deutsche Bank’s vacated New Broad Street premises. The use (albeit temporary) of this prime piece of real estate is the proverbial silver lining in the dark cloud of financial recession, from which this peripatetic gallery takes its name.
Continuing with that shiny note this group show by six artists provides a select but considered reflection on aspects of the ‘elemental’ – be that a force of nature, something unknowable, chemical or supernatural. So among the works we have Liberty Smith and Sophie Windsor Clive’s atmospheric short film of their unexpected encounter with a huge murmuration of starlings as they canoe along the Shannon river, Andrew Dodds’s minimal but memorable sound piece, which reworks Radio 4’s Shipping Forecast and Joe Duggan’s photograph of two large rocks within the landscape, that quite literally hold the weight of history and the effects of time within their formation.
That the space itself still contains the remnants of its former use, such as a carpet-tiled floor full of cable points and vertical office window blinds, adds another aspect of the elemental – something basic or fundamental – which in turn has been altered by the artists’ own forces.