A Group Show From New York

Canada provided a sense of the homemade, in that all the works were painterly, often muddied in palette and lo-fi in physical appearance. Running through two spaces in the Charlotte Road, London, gallery, Canada brought the work of a group of younger artists into a dialogue with the established work of David Askevold, who is one of the figures who made the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design such an influential institution in the 1970s. The exhibition's name derives from the Art by Wicks Gallery in New York, from which the show was exported, although among the artists only Askevold is Canadian.

In the middle of the main gallery space there was a cardboard sculpture, Sarah Braman's Donkey (Euphoric) (2006). Sections of text from commercial packaging--a Sharp TV box--marked and erased with paint were visible, interspersed with cut, folded and ripped sections of the material. The roughly hewn construction appeared to melt into the floor. Removed from any discernable narrative, a sloppily painted blue line drew the eye into the interior of the structural wreckage where awkward pockets of blacked-out abyss lent no further clues.

The remaining works in the exhibition were all wall-based, and walking clockwise from the entrance in the main gallery the first works encountered were three medium-sized prints by Askevold, collectively titled Childhood Drawings Surrendered (1-3) (2001-3). In each one a border enclosed a black space-like void containing refracted rainbows of sharply contrasting fluorescent colours. The childlike conjunction of abstract shapes, recognizable objects and the high-keyed, almost vulgar, aesthetic of the works created ambiguous compositions in which the translucent sides of numbered gaming dice appeared to be ocular landmasses, spacecraft or asteroids. The displaced sense of scale within Askevold's work was provoked further by drawings that referenced Aztec and "primitive" notions of picture-making, scratched and carved into the sides of these solid yet lucent objects. Elongated and angular hybrid animals, reminiscent of Egyptian carvings, helped to create a sense of contemporary carnival or circus.

Anke Weyer's large abstract art on canvas appeared heavy and muddied. Weyer's painting was lucid; it traded colour with brazen brushstrokes that read formally and figuratively as expansive abstracted landscape. Dark grounds were acutely set against sharp bursts of colour and drips gravitated upwards, distancing the work from a purely Abstract Expressionist frame of reference.

Moving clockwise through the gallery there were two almost identically medium-sized paintings by Elena Pankova, both called Untitled (2006). Their tight formalism and intelligently manipulated sense of sculpted space appeared to inform and be informed by the odd conjunction of cardboard shapes that made up Braman's floor piece.

Against the general sense of formal abstraction running through the works, Brian Belott's reassembled paper patchwork of mismatched squares and rectangles had an informal, erratic and disjointed surface. While the collaged, cartoon-inspired sections provided a humorous and purposefully kitschy aesthetic, the works lacked the clear edge of grittiness to which they and their titles gestured.

In somewhat marked contrast were a series of reconstructed photograph albums also by Belott. These "dark" anthologies of human psychosis juxtaposed unseen images (turned-over photographs with a mix of messages written and scrawled across them, ranging from personal feelings, notes and descriptions to perverse fantasies) with visible photographs that animated and hinted at the collection's origins as holiday snapshots. Graduation (2005), a high school graduation album from 1993 lavished with a predictable level of graphic and pictorial exuberance, was the most succinct work, pinpointing a moment of transition in the lives of young people. The charged adolescent messages written across every inch of conceivable space on the opening pages of the book added to the abstract dialogue created by Belott's adjacent manipulation of images and text within the remainder of the album.

The heart of the exhibition was the collection of early video works by Askevold dating from the late 60s and early 70s. Made in a formative time for video, with the advent of the technology, Nova Scotia Fire (1969) shows raw footage of a lakeside, with burning trails of fire running through it. Catapult (1970) another leading example of Askevold's work, shows trails of gunpowder in neat lines levelled across a road. The artist's lower body is seen running and jumping onto a plank of wood balanced across an oil drum. His repeated action catapults a series of fireballs in or around the lines of gunpowder to ignite and burn out.

These video works marked out the terrain of intuition, action and playful abstraction that draws together the works of Weyer, Pankova, Witney, Belott and Braman. Of these artists it was the sharp and measured balance of Pankova's paintings that stood out most. Braman's cardboard worked also; although the concise formal construction of her flat wall-based works (found in the back gallery) fared much better than the more brutish, obtuse floor piece in the main space. From folded cardboard to retreating painted voids, the abstract language of brushstroke and handmade marks by these artists set in motion a loose set of reference points that neatly added to Askevold's complex and long-developed art practice.