Rob and Nick Carter describe themselves as colourists – certainly, their ‘Postcards from Vegas’ are a riot of different hues and intensities, combining outdated postcard imagery, re-photographed and enlarged, with neon lighting copied from Las Vegas’s famously tacky signage. Juxtaposing the tubing’s candy-coloured luminosity against the Technicolor-drenched nostalgia of the postcard backdrops, the 14 works can’t help but be kitschily, queasily seductive.
At the same time, the British duo also have a keen eye for formal properties, and the best works here explore such associations and contrasts – the dancing legs of a hot pink stripper seeming to mimic a background image of strutting flamingos, for example; or the blazing admonition, ‘sin will find you out’, outlined by a multicolour crucifix, which the artists have superimposed against the similarly criss-crossing contours of a looping motorway junction.
Less engaging, though, are those pieces that aim for a more blatantly humorous, ironic combination: the word ‘topless’ placed against some grumpy-looking London beefeaters, or a volcanic eruption in Japan overlayed with an ice-cream cone swirl – the incongruities just aren’t particularly witty. Moreover, the move away from strictly American imagery tends to highlight what’s really the central problem with the show, which is that there appears to be no coherent rationale behind the selection of postcards or signage, no sense of system or methodology beyond the mere fact of trying to produce something visually diverting.
As such, rather than any sense of cultural critique or psychological disclosure – such as you get with surrealist montage, for instance – all that you end up with here is the feeling of a whirlwind, slightly patronising tour through kitsch visual culture, in which certain elements have been whimsically picked out for our wry, superficial delectation.