Project Space: Alice May Williams / Jerwood Encounters: 3-Phase, review: Monuments, dreams and memories
Young artists Kelly Best and Georgie Grace are shown together in 3-Phase but their work is hugely different.
Best makes systematic yet intuitive drawings with graphite lines on dark backgrounds. In her largest work, hundreds of these vertical lines are inscribed on a black curving wall, which looks monumental from a distance and intimate close up.
Grace’s video and photographic work fuses ominous text and found imagery — a dreamlike archival landscape is accompanied by the phrase “This time of day can be dangerous”. Her video emphasises this discomfiting feel. Utopian slogans speak of a machine offering “the power to alter reality to suit your needs” alongside scattered utopian archival imagery. Impressive, providing it’s a springboard to more original work.
Alice May Williams’s project — an audio work, etched spidergram and printed drape hung from the ceiling — is only part-way through. Triggered by an evocative tape of Williams’s great-great-grandmother reminiscing in 1959 and weaved with historical and literary references, it will lead to a film, premiering at the Jerwood this month. It should prove fascinating.
3-Phase until June 21, Williams until August 29 (020 7654 0179, jerwoodvisualarts.org)
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