All sculpture is an argument about space and relationships – but Michael Joo gives that idea a sociopolitical spin, using forms that speak of social control and demarcation: riot shields lining the gallery wall, and rope barriers, the sort used outside nightclubs and VIP areas.
The works are fashioned from pristinely polished, super-reflective glass, so that the viewer's own, excluded position becomes mirrored and incorporated as part of the barrier itself – a rather neat way of highlighting the endlessly circular, reciprocal nature of class constructions and other such social ideologies.
The two sets of works make different points – the rope barriers looping distractedly around the walls and floor, some lengths dangling pointlessly, others tightly crisscrossing, making a nonsense of exclusion and zoning; the riot shields mostly splattered and streaked in paint, as if attacked by protestors trying to obliterate their own reflections.
Taken together, though, it all feels too pat, as if the installations have simply been set up to be decoded – the various metaphors and references trotted out in a way that seems, ironically, too neatly marshalled and regimented. Ultimately, it's hard to shake the sense of glibness – this vague evocation of sociopolitical issues, without actually exploring any specific cultural instances.
More effective are the American artist's quartet of mounted antlers – a motif he has often used to suggest ideas about nature and artifice. These ones, made from shiny blue plastic, are obviously not real, but nor are they simple casts or reproductions. Rather, they're casts of casts – the antlers surrounded by a sleeve of excess material, fringed with drips, which correspond to the external surfaces of the original rubber moulds. Compared to the mirrored works, these are far more successful, complex, irresolvable – an unsettling combination of inside and outside space, a simultaneous self-negation and self-fetishisation.