Jane and Louise Wilson: A Free and Anonymous Monument
Baltic, Gateshead; until November 30

Martin Puryear
Baltic, Gateshead; until November 30

There is a difficult – and crowded – space in art where images of tedious familiarity are re-contextualised to make us look at them again with fresh eyes. Boyle Family made it work with random slices of earth; so does German paper sculptor Thomas Demand; now Newcastle twins Jane and Louise Wilson have put together their most ambitious installation to date, exploring the peripheral spaces of industrial architecture in North East England.

The twins chose their sites carefully: all have been subject to urban regeneration, and none are particularly pretty. Gateshead Car Park, immortalised in Get Carter; an engine factory; a micro-chip factory; an oil-rig; and an example of delapidated 1950s public art, the Apollo Pavilion in Peterlee. The latter, designed by Victor Pasmore as a place to play, forms the basis for the Wilson sisters’ installation at Baltic – 13 large-scale translucent screens hang at various heights and angles to create a multi-faceted space through which to walk and explore.

Projected on each of the screens are synchronised video sequences depicting the most unassuming parts of each of these buildings – the camera often still, sometimes moving, the soundtrack unembellished. The result is a sort of modern pastoral, whose landscapes are replaced with man-made structures and whose human population is just as incidental as it used to be.

The complex physical set-up is impressive, combining a kaleidoscopic range of video projections at close proximity to each other, allowing the viewer to walk in and around the piece while only rarely getting in the way of a projector beam. The result is a film-noir sense of lost boundaries, knowing there are things happening beyond your sphere of vision, and confusing real people and their shadows with those in the video.

This multi-screen construction is ripe with potential for video, multimedia and games, and at the risk of committing great critical heresy, the Wilsons have used it instead for presenting footage which is unfortunately quite boring.

Upstairs, Baltic presents the first big UK show of African-American sculptor-printmaker Martin Puryear. At first sight the exhibition is strongly reminiscent of Claire Barclay’s current show at DCA. There is the same striking combination of natural and synthetic materials, the same emphasis on craftwork and delicate balance, even the same oblique reference to functionality, and all in a big light-filled modern gallery space.

The key difference, however, is that there is more a sense of resolution in Puryear’s work than tension. The pieces are physically and psychologically stable, creating pleasing, visually satisfying shapes while playing with our perception of the materials.

Brunhilde, made of cedarwood and rattan, is a tall pillow-shaped wooden lattice, bulging and cartoon-like. It looks like a simple piece of lattice-work until you get close, when it becomes apparent that it has been painstakingly stuck together, piece by individual piece, and the seemingly casual spaghetti of loose ends at either end has been cleverly constructed with remarkable craftsmanship. The temptation to lift the piece and stand inside is matched by the urge to enter another of Puryear’s sculptures, Confessional, a tarred, bulbous wire mesh upended and impenetrable.

Puryear’s enduring theme, it seems, is the vessel: seen in his accompanying etchings and aquatints, these primitive, organic, spouted vessels are undoubtedly symbols of human sexuality, and recur in much of his sculpture. Interestingly, we are conspicuously denied access, and without knowing more about the man himself, I wouldn’t wish to comment on the significance of that.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 05.10.03