Art review: Nick Relph at Overduin and Kite
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For an artist with a decade-long reputation for cheeky angst, Nick Relph can make work that is oddly facile and decorative. The young British artist’s solo show at Overduin and Kite (until recently he has teamed up with Oliver Payne) touches on fashion, authorship, integrity, subversive style and its exploitation, and the life of the street. But it fails to settle meaningfully anywhere.
A tilted fluorescent fixture mounted outside above the gallery door is invisible and inconsequential by day. Just inside, the first room has been made into a camera obscura, casting on a freestanding wall a truly live feed of Sunset Boulevard’s street traffic, upside down, as per the laws of optics. This bare-bones demonstration-cum-installation turns out to be more compelling than the self-indulgent, labored efforts in the gallery beyond.
“The Punk and Her Music,” a 20-minute video loop, intersperses snippets of a documentary on punk culture with footage of a young woman in London in requisite spiked mohawk and studded leather jacket, a glance at Big Ben’s hands spinning backward, and more. Many of the scenes are upside down, as if claiming the unmediated veracity of the camera obscura image next door, but the affectation falls flat. The transformation of punk from an attitude to an assumed, commercialized aesthetic emerges haltingly as a theme here and in a set of altered postcards, but content is skimpy throughout.
Two pedestals designed to hold books for photographic replication emit a beeping pulse but are otherwise mute. In a blandly attractive set of photographic prints, Relph layers images from a ‘70s line of counterculture-wear with pieces of fruit in off-register color separations. It’s impossible to tell whether he is challenging the dilution and exploitation of punk’s culture of protest, or whether he is intentionally just doing it. Either way, the results are ridiculously benign.
-- Leah Ollman
Overduin and Kite, 6693 Sunset Blvd., (323) 464-3600, through Aug. 14. Closed Sunday and Monday. www.overduinandkite.com
Images: Installation view (top) and Body Cruiser. Courtesy of Overduin and Kite.