John Tiney may just have invented a new genre: meta-post-medium. Before seguing into video, painting and sculpture, this show opens with photography and, like the exhibition as a whole, these medium-scale snapshots feel to be about orientation, sense-making within confusion. In them, the artist skips from Stoke Newington to LA to Budapest to Moscow – lens trained on roadsides, markets, tennis courts, he’s a formalist flâneur locating little instances of comforting, improvisatory organisation: two smeared brown lines from a crushed chocolate bar, or an ersatz Ben Nicholson seen in a manhole with a road marking painted on it.
Next door, more structuring: a video, ‘Ringtone’ (2011), finds Tiney extracting every instance of The Dude saying ‘man’ in ‘The Big Lebowski’ (yes, there are lots) and, gradually, isolating the ones whose notes approximate the intergalactic call sign in ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’.
Two paintings, meanwhile, conceal their forms – a palm tree’s trunk, a zebra’s body – in the heavily grained wood they’re painted on. What the suspended sculpture of a head trapped in a barrel is about, I’m not sure, but its obduracy might be apropos. Here’s a show in which notions of imposing order on disorder find expression not only within the works, but in the whole sprawl of formats deployed. It’s a neat, circular gambit, one that isn’t afraid to alienate at first and charm later.