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Caulfield is often called a Pop artist. This was a label he resisted throughout his life, and it is easy to see why. Although his use of bold colours, industrial materials and commonplace subjects suggest a connection to works by Lichtenstein and Warhol, Caulfield’s pieces do not have the same brazenly confident vapidity as those of his colourful contemporaries. His reductive compositions are deceptively simple, and are evocative and often unexpectedly touching in their suggestion of personal narrative. Caulfield extracts specific details or moments in time from everyday life – the shapely bends of a curvaceous jug, the undisturbed surface of a body of liquid in a discarded glass – and with them creates melancholic, still scenes with the atmosphere of a stage set hours after a heated performance.

This small show coincides with Tate Britain’s exhibition of Caulfield’s monumental oil paintings, some of which are two metres high. The Alan Cristea Gallery’s range of smaller scale prints provides a more personal portrait of the late artist. Or, at least, a portrait of him as I imagine him to be – contemplative, introvert and exacting, but with a wry humour and a tendency not to take things too seriously. Whether you’re in the mood to laugh or cry, go to see Patrick Caulfield. His work has the capacity for both. (Words: Florence Ritter) 

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Mirza, winner of the Silver Lion Award for a promising young artist two years ago at the Venice Biennale, is known for his ambitious and ground-breaking work with sound, sculpture, space and light. His sensory immersive sonic environments reverberate through the rooms at Lisson Gallery: ‘it’s weird – you can feel it right through your body’ one visitor commented whilst standing in the ‘LED surround sound sequencer’ upstairs at the gallery. Another: ‘this is how my brain works’.

The ‘LED surround sound sequencer’ (another of the bullet points) can be found in an airless and grey soundproofed room, where a ring of speakers are linked up to a small ring of LEDs. The interlinking wires are pulled taut and precisely arranged in a kind of elegant 3-D line drawing, and the lights flash on and off in an unknown automated sequence, communicating with their opposite speakers which pulsate in tandem.

Downstairs, the spotless floor of the gallery is dotted with turntables, wires, pieces of vinyl and great wads of violently angular soundproofing foam mounted at different points on the walls. Crackling, scratching, whomp-whomping sounds pick their way across the room.

Mirzas’s work is not confined to the series of spaces at Lisson Gallery. This week will see the opening of a second audio composition and light installation at the Hepworth Wakefield, where Mirza works with the architecture to distort and change the displays of objects from the Hepworth’s collection of modern British painting and sculpture. His work also expands into the internet sphere, on Vinyl Factory‘s interactive website, where all of Mirza’s samples are available to play with. If you’re nifty with an MP4 and fancy yourself as a potential collaborator, there is also the chance to put together a track  – which might even stand the chance of being released by the record label. (Words: Florence Ritter)

On until June 29th. For more info, visit: www.lissongallery.com/#/artists/haroon-mirza

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Mirage (Jammer) (detail), 1975

tone: Rauschenberg’s Jammers, created in 1975 following the artist’s short trip to India. The Jammers are made of gauzy fabrics which seem to skim the walls, hanging weightlessly from pins or lightly strung from large, propped-up rattan poles. Broad quadrangular panels each dyed in a single, vivid colour are carefully stitched together: in Gull, deep blue is married with muted taupe, in Mirage, canary yellow with scarlet. The colours sing out into the stark white space from behind intervening layers of translucent muslin. Some of the pieces incorporate tin cans, scrubbed and shining, providing little punctuation marks to the big statements of colour. Although their aesthetic is certainly simpler and more elegant than Rauschenberg’s other work, the Jammers do not represent a total departure from previous projects. As their own breed of wall-based sculptural textiles they too refuse to be confined to one artistic category.

Untitled (Jammer) (detail), 1975

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Curious? Who wouldn’t be? At East London’s Matt’s Gallery this month, these otherworldly accounts are the material for Channels, a new audio-sculptural installation by Susan Hiller. From a large wall of flickering television sets-on-standby, various disembodied voices describe – or try to describe –their encounters with the Other, in their accounts of Near Death Experiences (NDEs).

In between these short narratives, there are relatively long periods of quiet in the concrete space, with only the familiar crackling hiss of white noise coming from each of the television sets. Visitors sit and watch the blank screens expectedly, as if waiting for a technical fault to be resolved. When a single voice does speak out, it punctures the toneless white noise with bright clarity. But it is joined by other voices, which, rising together, begin to babble over one another. We find ourselves struggling to hear, grasping after the individual voices and wanting to understand the significance of what it is exactly that they are describing.

There is no harmonious scientific explanation for NDEs. Although the speakers featured in Hiller’s work come from locations across the globe, they are united in their faltering attempts to express the definitively ineffable. The imagery they use contains certain recurring motifs: bright lights getting brighter, a sudden warmth, a sense of floating, a draining away of any feelings of pain or fear. This repetition is not entirely unexpected, as this kind of imagery has seeped sideways into our cultural language, in spite of the mixed reception of NDEs. Hiller is interested in the marginal, things we consider trivial or don’t take seriously, and she is fascinated by unexplained phenomena.

This is a piece as much about everyday earthly life as it is about anything in the ether. Hiller’s piece doesn’t offer any judgement as to the level of ‘truth’ behind the NDEs but simply presents us with them as an aspect of human experience. They are for Hiller cultural artefacts, or ‘social facts’. Are they visions of truth, bewildering misperceptions or straight out delusional? It doesn’t matter. Channels is a portrait of a rare phenomenon which depends upon personal testimony and eschews empirical investigation. Indulge your imagination and open your mind. (Words: Florence Ritter)

Susan Hiller: Channels at Matt’s Gallery is on until April 14th. For more info visit: www.mattsgallery.org/artists/hiller/exhibition-4.php

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new and different ways. The projects on show at D Eye Y were developed with input from members of the local public, who were invited to partake in a series of workshops held in Battersea Park, commissioned by the Pump House Gallery. Participants were taught how to make cameras out of objects as unexpected as peanut shells, and how to take fantastically warped portraits of their surroundings with their own bespoke SlitScan cameras – which they themselves made from scratch. Holding an image of the world in your hands, with the knowledge that you have Done It Yourself without any digital input, suddenly seems impossibly far-fetched and incredible. BBKP’s projects are about innovation, problem-solving and the practical exploration of materials. Their inventive approach to their apparatus creates a new kind of camera vision and lends a real physicality to the photographic print which comes to be valued as an object in itself, not just one of hundreds of images. Take your time over this show –there’s a lot to see. (Words: Florence Ritter) D Eye Y is on at the Pump House Gallery until April 7th. For more info, visit: www.pumphousegallery.org.uk

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