What does an artist do when she has “nothing to say?” Admitting outright, as Southgate-Smith does in her exhibition text, that the intellectual ethos that drove her production (to say nothing of her gallery’s programme) is now sterile might have marked a turning point.
There is no trace of this in the work, alas. Austere abstractions like in the hotel lobby, found photographs pinned up with fridge magnets, an inconsequential, feint soundtrack, and an intriguing, but ultimately unyielding index-card sculpture all fall back on the very same verbiage that today unambiguously denounces them.
The old tricks don’t work, and it is stupefying to see this production and think that they ever did. Still, one might have expected the old regime to put up some fight. It is clearly too late to save it, yet too early to mourn.
