Manchester\'s CUBE explores the origins

16 Aug 2005

Manchester’s Cube hosts a show that brings together the work of design students from across Manchester Metropolitan University.
Phil Griffin reports on the best.

This exhibition is the greatest hits from this summer’s Manchester Metropolitan University Faculty of Art and Design degree shows. Its title, “18 Modern Originals”, is a twist on a phrase dreamed up by Manchester’s creative director Peter Saville. Saville has suggested the term “Original Modern” as a means of branding the city. This exhibition contains Modern Originals but is imbued with the flavour of Saville’s Original Modern concept. The show has been curated by Bev Bytheway, and is the first to occupy the Cube gallery since director Graeme Russell moved on, and a new regime yet to declare itself.
If you’ve not visited Cube, you may not appreciate the quality of the place. Architect Stephen Hodder turned out two floors of spatial variety that present a narrative challenge to any curator. The space has been well handled here. The first room on the ground floor, is dominated by Paul Russon’s sculptural piece, “System Breakdown”. This is a pair of opposing road traffic lights, deconstructed, rendered in white and suspended between floor and ceiling, in section. Two exploding traffic lights, frozen. It’s a very cool piece, as it flashes in the middle of the room: clean, clinical and surprisingly appealing.
Russon’s lights are nicely set off by a photographic piece alongside. This is Laura Healey’s “Matchstick”. These are photographs of a thin girl in a red dress, head and neck invisible behind a gauze of match-red wool. The matchgirl stands in unaffected landscape, the ultimate incendiary device. She’s matched by Jessica Flavia Mayo’s “Untitled Self-portrait”. This is a scenic photograph in a gilt frame. It’s a big country shot, possibly of the Lakes or Lancashire fells. In the left foreground, almost edging out of frame, is the blurred image of a woman, holding something to her head. Why, in the midst of all that scenic beauty is a woman about to blow her brains out? Why did Dylan Thomas drink himself to death? It’s all too much.
In the basement is a four part piece by Becky Sobell, called “There is such Beauty in Utility”. The main focus is a series of panels, photographs of what looks to me like Heysham Nuclear Power Station in Morecambe Bay. Sobell has drawn and photo-montaged on to these, images of sunbathers, men and women under beach umbrellas, or strolling happily in the sand. It’s abrasive stuff.
None of the exhibitors are identified by their disciplines in the exhibition notes. However, pieces by architecture students are easiest to spot. They look like architecture projects. Tony Ip has produced drawings and a model for a building called “Emotions”. Joy, hatred, lust, love and excitement, in the shape of a hotel. The site is real enough; it’s just along from Manchester Crown Court, which is a slab of 50s central European austerity clad in Portland Stone. The Emotions building is modelled like a giant birthday cake, covered in multicoloured icing. The model is realised in all sorts of fabrics and materials, including yellow tennis balls and sheets of brown rawlplugs.
Another architectural piece is a hotel and commercial project called “Linear Waters”, by Damian Burrows. It takes a site adjacent to Port Sunlight, on the Wirral, and has a proper crack at developing it for commercial use. The result, good as it is, feels curiously hidebound in this company.
Ben Rustage has made a mesmerising video. It moves through various locations in the middle of Manchester – door-ways, steps and corners – and populates them with spirit-like dancing characters. They move about in slow motion, swirling and sweeping on and around things. The spirit bodies are made up of image overlays; crowds of people, shot on video, matted on to the moving cut-out forms. The whole is washed in pulsing colour and light changes, and played out to a wafting ambient soundtrack. The same single faux-religious image, like a sacrament held high, appears in a corner of each location. A high point in a well-gauged show.