There’s something of the reluctant speed dater about this small group exhibition: the awkward sense of entry into an anticipated moment of self-promotion. The works, by three recent female graduates, are all presented beautifully enough – but this taster-session approach does not equally introduce each practice. Rose Davey, Amy Gee and Sarah Poots were the 2010 recipients of Acme Studios’ awards, comprising a rent-free workspace for a year, a stipend and mentorship from a range of practitioners. It’s a great way to enter professional life, but I’m left wondering from this cautious selection how the experience has worked for them.
Poots’s super-slight but rather intense compositions work well – although there are only two on show. Davey, on the other hand, has made almost half of the works in the show – lovely frame-like paintings of rectangular forms on wooden surfaces. With one particular pastel example, employing the grain of the ground beneath, she achieves a curious chromatic tension, but, clustered together and dotted among the other works, they begin to feel like heavy-handed punctuation. Gee’s business-like set of figures (a series of architectural drawings and photos of housing estates) look the part but there’s not enough research data here to reveal what it’s all about. While ‘The Desirability of Things’ is certainly a more collaborative affair than the graduate show experience, the format still feels rather managed.