What is it with emerging artists? They love to take a walk on the dark side, and an atmosphere of lurking danger and death is tangible in a crop of current installations. Not that I dislike them, the morbid sets are often more like a scary movie, and there’s a tongue in cheek quality that retains a lighter touch. Downstairs at Gimpel Fils I found an installation by the duo littlewhitehead (Craig Little and Blake Whitehead b.1965); littlewhitehead have recently exhibited in Bloomberg’s New Contemporaries and are showing at the Talbot Rice Gallery Edinburgh this summer.

The Gimpels’ installation is faintly macabre; ‘Mama – ‘Mother the cloth smells like death!', is the scrawled inscription on a bare canvas introducing the exhibit. Faced with three large blank canvases I was drawn to a minute centre mark, which turned out to be a peephole edged with brass. Through this you spied different interiors; a red room, French windows to a snowy garden; secret spaces and other dimensions rather like the 17th century peepshow cabinets of Dutch interiors by Samuel van Hoogstraten. Without explanatory texts you begin to construct your own stories. I became aware, in the low-lit space, of someone else present, and turned to see a life-size mechanical man in a rather worn out novelty dog costume, repeatedly hitting his head against the wall, as if trapped in a robotic depression.

Turning again, I encountered in a dark corner an old baggage trunk, a wooden crate secured with steel bars; and sure enough, through a hole in the lid emerged a pointing finger, which quivered for a moment and withdrew back into the container.

The repetitious gestures added to a claustrophobic atmosphere, which I both resisted and was engaged by. The setting challenged me to explore my feelings of intrigue and collusion with the work. The real and the fictional became entwined and exchangeable, sited in a grey area of voyeuristic sensation that makes the installation both compelling and penetrating.

-- Nicholas James

All images Courtesy the Artists and Gimpel Fils Gallery

Images from Top to Bottom: (littlewhitehead, Fur Suit 2009, mechanical mixed media, life-size sculpture, 83 in/210.8 cm tall; littlewhitehead, The Chamber (From the Peep Hole series) 2009, mixed media, 31.5 x 48 in/80 x 121.9 cm; littlewhitehead, Fur Suit 2009, mechanical mixed media, life-size sculpture, 83 in/210.8 cm tall.)