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28/5/2009

Alistair McClymont

Wyer Gallery, London

In The Limitations of Logic, his second solo exhibition at Wyer Gallery, Alistair McClymont presents the second in his series of tornado installations. A new horizontal tornado occupies the whole front section of the gallery where a system of scaffolding, industrial scale fans and an ultrasonic humidifier project a twisting ten-foot funnel against the gallery window. The new installation features alongside drawings made by the tornado itself: works in ink on paper formed by the tornado’s movement across the sheet.

From the pavement, at first glance, Wyer Gallery’s chipboard-clad frontage might appear a timely signal of its demise. Closer inspection through a square aperture in one of the chipboard sheets reveals McClymont’s otherworldly, curiously foreshortened tornado, its eye coiling in and out of frame. Once inside, the visitor to the gallery is free to interact with the tornado, touch it, walk around it, become part of the artwork. And this dual process is crucial to its success, the visitor partaking of and becoming part-of the meteorological peep show.

This chipboard with which McClymont has housed his tornado is fast becoming synonymous with his methodology. And, in common with most of his chosen materials, as well as the makeshift or roughly fashioned nature of his sculpture, it seems to stand for what is transitory or impermanent in contemporary culture. Its crudeness as medium, here alongside bare scaffolding and exposed pipe work and hosing, seems at once at odds with the magical ethereality of the tornado as well as indicative of its elusive content. And paradoxical notions weave throughout the artwork, not just in a tornado’s obvious capacity for devastation in tandem with its captivating allure; its justifiable facility to inspire immense fear and immense wonder in equal measure, but, too, in sculptor McClymont’s devising such a complex cloud-machine in order to execute such uncomplicated or minimalist art on paper.

Alistair McClymont’s work was last seen in Heart of Glass, part of Flora Fairbairn and Paul Hitchman’s London arts festival Concrete and Glass, in which he exhibited The Limitations of Logic and Absence of Absolute Certainty, an artwork considered ‘a piece of meteorological magic’, by The Guardian’s Helen Pidd. In the past, McClymont’s work has investigated the romanticism with which cultural products have been invested, from Hollywood films to insurance and packets of crisps. A video work entitled The Dark Side of The Rainbow (2006), for instance, in which the Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd is dubbed over The Wizard of Oz, explores the film’s place at the heart of a long standing urban myth or conspiracy. However, he works across disciplines using well-known commodities, brands and logos as recurring themes. As such, his work defies categorization and the sheer diversity of his style is reflected in an extensive creation of drawings, videos, photographic work and installations.

Private View: Friday 29th May 2009, 6.30 - 8.30

Wyer Gallery
191 St. John's Hill - London
Free admission

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