Angela Kingston reviews New Art West Midlands 2015

The first year or two after doing a fine art degree are critical. Students put everything they have into their final show, and they have support, equipment and camaraderie.

And then… …the ground disappears from under their feet. They now have to make it on their own as artists. It’s something I’ve been through myself: like a Looney Toons cartoon character who had run off the edge of a cliff, suspended in mid-air, realisation dawning, toes casting around for something to prevent my fall. And for graduating students today, not least because of their debts, the canyon they hover over is ever deeper and wider.

New Art West Midlands is a multi-venue exhibition that has taken 30 newly launched artists from the region and given them a precious toehold. For the visitor, the reward is a kind of exhibition-as-newspaper: the chance to see the right-here-and-right-now of contemporary visual art. I am gripped by a chapter of a graphic novel by Shijie Hai called Sleep Paralysis .

Told from the artist’s perspective, it depicts the state of being semi-awake and yet completely unable to move. Many of the individual frames of the story are filled with complete darkness, or edgy, psychedelic patterns, or a lampshade that’s multiplying on the ceiling. In the final frame, there is a haunting plea: ‘Remember, last time/ if you see my fingers turning into gold/ you must wake me up.’ The artist’s dream-state has messed with time and logic, and it has also supplied a kind of riddle.

And as Sigmund Freud proposed, phenomena such as dreams and art, and also riddles or jokes, contain mechanisms that enable us to look into the unconscious. Fingers turning into gold?

At face value about flesh and bone becoming metal, Shijie Hai’s strange phrase is surely also about that burning desire artists have to transform what they have in their hands into something with new meaning – a mysterious transformation that for them is as precious as gold. You must wake me up? This last phrase of the artwork strikes me as having to do with artists’ predicament of needing an audience. Without which, making art is a one-way street, a dead-end – a kind of paralysis.

Squid (2014) Megan Sheridan. The pressing of Megan Sheridan’s finger on the shutter-release button of her camera has resulted in precisely the kind of alchemy that Shijie Hai’s dream alludes to, and her photograph, called Squid , certainly grabs my attention – and other people’s, I noticed when visiting the exhibition.

There’s a bright orange space-alien, with a bulging head, hooded eyes, and a forked front limb. But look again, and the photograph is actually of a fishmonger, with a pair of squids hanging in front of his face, his left arm distorted by being caught mid-motion, artificial lighting making the colours sci-fi strange. It is gloriously bizarre and unsettling. One of the selectors, Bedwyr Williams, writes that it ‘made me sit up and feel sick at the same time’.

Lisa Marie Williams demonstrates consummate skill in combining the most ordinary objects and materials to create her own kind of gold: sculptures that pulse with humanity. At the epicentre of her tableau, Fluoxetine – named after a drug for depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder – is a gargantuan ‘breast’, made of kapok-stuffed tights with blue cord and red thread ‘veins’, which has wedged itself underneath a broken table. In front of this, some jointed lengths of wood resemble a pair of legs, their stance partly protective, partly panicked, which are shod with men’s shoes, the laces of which have come undone.

To one side, there’s a tiny child with an oversized pom-pom head, sad witness to it all. Narratives sympathetic to family meltdown seep through and around it all. Fluoxetine (2014) Lisa-Marie Williams.

I picture Jade Simpson as an artist who fidgets and fiddles with things, running cloth through her hands, gathering up odd items, holding them in different ways and examining them from a variety of angles. Until something unexpected – and precious – occurs.

Her sculpture The Spirit Collection is an imposing grouping of composite animals, more than two metres high, made by draping fabrics over wood and cardboard. There’s a polar-bear-snake, a wild-boar-cricket-frog, a walrus-starling, and favourite of all, a gull with splays of wooden clothes hangers for beak and claws. On one hand, the creatures have enormous appeal, and on the other, they frighten: The Spirit Collection seems to be both a commentary on human sentimentality and a portent of nature as vengeful.

There is a lot of emotion in New Art West Midlands, and James Turner’s artwork John Millais comes across as a counter to this. He’s mounted a transparency of Millais’ famously emotive painting, The Blind Girl , on to a light-box.

An ‘Aztec’ head replaces the blind girl’s, and patterned curlicues wrap around her and enter her companion’s eyes. Besides which, these additions light up in a sequence of colours, giving the effect of a Wurlitzer jukebox. When you and I visit exhibitions, we are the audience that artists simply must have, not least in terms of psychological survival – and never more so than at this vertiginous, early stage of their careers. New Art West Midlands, with its depth and breadth of talent, is deserving of our avid attention.

Angela Kingston Curator and visual arts writer http://www.angelakingston.co.uk Exhibition 2015 13 November – 23 December The SALON exhibition showcases contemporary art for sale at the Waterhall Gallery, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery. Exhibition 2016 12 February - 15 May A selected West Midlands graduates’ exhibition that takes place at venues across the region between February and May each year. The New Art West Midlands 2016 exhibition was selected by Sonia Boyce, John Stezaker and Katharine Stout and features work by 43 artists.

Editorial Barbara Walker’s Shock and Awe reviewed by Andrew Jackson Friday 13th May 2016 Trevor Pitt and the Preston Street Union Wednesday 13th April 2016 Subscribe Friends of New Art WM If you are interested in staying up-to-date with contemporary art in the region or in buying and collecting please join our mailing list. Curators’ Network If you are a curator or visual arts professional and interested in the contemporary art landscape of the West Midlands please join our mailing list. Angela Kingston reviews New Art West Midlands 2015 - New Art WM Developing the market for contemporary art in the West Midlands 7ads6x98y