Despite this gallery’s modest size, it takes more than a moment to note that one is in an exhibition. This is only partly because the space is also a bookshop: Ali Glover turned the showroom interior walls inside out. This gesture makes for a peculiarly sterile building site and an adventure playground for two others.
Elli Antoniou’s drawings in metal rendered on steel panels with the aid of an angle grinder are thrillingly disorientating. The internal reflections of these slivery surfaces defy the picture plane. One blink of the eye reveals barbed wire and a planetary system. A second gives way to a whole new cosmos.
Echoing this doubt, Richard Dean Hughes’ resin cast bedding is half NHS waiting room, half luxury Egyptian cotton. Beads of glass strewn across these forms point to some dramatic fracture while sheets of newspaper suggest that it is long in the past.
These works could bear witness to the birth of a star or the heat death of the universe. The curators, sadly, don’t want to know which. This sends Glover to Sisyphean toil while letting Antoniou and Hughes chase myths of their own making.
