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Crossing a pencil-thin boundary

Angela Kelly
5/11/2008

A FASCINATING collection of work that comes under the heading of ‘subversive’ art opens at Cornerhouse this Friday.

The Intertwining Line presents early and contemporary animation and its interlinked relationship with artists’ drawings, highlighting the relationship between these two disciplines.

It features the work of nine artists, including internationally-acclaimed Dan Perjovschi and Margaret Harrison, alongside a new generation of British illustrators.

Their work will be accompanied by screenings of Czech animations and films selected from international animation festival Tricky Women

Whilst animation is often considered childlike entertainment, the radical potential of the medium has a long history. Drawing also has this potential, whether through meticulously crafted images that merely hint at social unease or speedily drawn sketches carrying a powerful charge of immediacy to create political statements.

The concept of the uncanny in everyday life is a theme connecting many of the artists in the exhibition.

Manchester-based Rachel Goodyear’s delicately executed drawings present disjointed narratives in which the familiar becomes menacing.

Austrian artist Ulrike Lienbacher’s images of young women going about intimate, everyday actions such as washing share with Goodyear’s work a sense of the uncanny.

Another Manchester-based artist, Naomi Kashiwagi, explores the relationship between music, language and drawing processes. In a new work created for this exhibition, Kashiwagi uses a gramophone as a drawing tool, presenting the resulting drawing only. Music is also integral to Guto Nobrega’s video Happiness, in which time-lapse movies of plants and drawings are projected on to the body of a female performer.

Catherine Bertola uses dust in her practice to produce haunting and evocatively beautiful installations, with patterns from wallpapers or carpets transferred into this material.

Other artists in the show take a more overt stance in their socio-political criticism. Dan Perjovschi’s sparsely delineated cartoons of stick men carry a charge of political humour.

Melanie Jackson uses drawing as a kind of analytical reportage in her installation Made in China, with its double-sided screen. And Sissu Tarka uses digital animation to transform images of iconic public figures including Richard Branson and Chairman Mao to comment on issues of capitalism and globalisation.

A satirical streak is also present in the work of Margaret Harrison, who appropriated images from comic books, advertising and pornography in her early work.

In one of her best-known works, Captain America, she reworks Myron’s classic comic book hero as an Amazonian heroine complete with stockings and stiletto heels.

Her work is presented in Gallery 3, alongside screenings from Tricky Women and student films from VSTUP – Prague’s Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design.

Also screening in this gallery are films by Robert James Bailey, an emerging Manchester-based artist whose work features as part of Cornerhouse Projects.

The Intertwining Line: Drawing as Subversive Art runs at Cornerhouse until January 11, 2009. For more information ring 0161 200 1500.