By Oliver Basciano On entering Mick Peter’s one-room installation at Cell Project Space, the viewer cannot help but feel they are being inducted into some kind of morality tale: not the condescending type, but the brooding darker warnings that fables and fairytales foretell.
The Nose: Epilogue (2010) evokes the sense that something’s gone down, and that something was none too pretty.
Mick Peter, The Nose: Epilogue installation view at Cell Projects. Courtesy the artist and Cell Projects The walls are entirely covered with an unrefined concrete cladding that sports jutting geometric footholds, akin to those of a climbing wall. The footholds would offer little help, however, to those inclined to scale the gallery walls; as soon as these ledges start around the entrance door they increasingly gather closer together, forming an architectural relief, until at the far end, they cluster into the outlines of courtly male and female figures. The motif – which suggests the shadows for some kind of Regency gathering – recurs, in a slightly different form, on the adjacent left wall. On the gallery floor stands the seemingly melted and destroyed remains of an orchestra’s accoutrements: music stands, made from blue latex tubing, are flopped depleted on the floor, ghostly silent.
The aesthetic reminds one of those images of Pompei, indisputably populated, though by a population that is reduced to nothing but static material. The stillness and permanence suggested by the wall cladding is juxtaposed by the flexibility of the music stand material, while the latter's shipshod layout suggest the flux and comic unreality of surrealist forms. It is in this interplay in which Peter’s production succeeds. The artist takes his exhibition title from a Nikolai Gogol short story, in which a man, having become unattached from his nose, attempts a reunion with the appendage. The music stands – in their surrealist, dream-like assemblage – seem representative of the nonsensical nature of the narrative; with the static human forms lending the tragic edge. Peter, in inviting the viewer into his sculptural vignette, asks us to ruminate on the happily ephemeral and the tragically permanent and the fine – life and death – line between.
The Nose: Epilogue
is at Cell Project Space, London until 25 July
