Nothing Less - Exhibition by Andy Irving

31 January - 2 March 2003 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
Andy Irving describes his exhibition Nothing Less as expressing an ‘urban vernacular’. Certainly the materials he uses to construct the works in the show—‘scavenged steel frame, second-hand TV, vehicle side-mirror, Christmas present from Tony…’, as he describes some of them on the wall labels—add up to a common-place aesthetic. Trained as an interior designer and having worked for several years on design and build projects for domestic, retail, office and exhibition spaces, Irving’s design practice informs his work as an artist. The pieces in Nothing Less demonstrate this merging between art and design in their emphasis on materials and craftsmanship.

The largely furniture-based objects seem to be intended for a space between domestic, office and gallery environments. They investigate new kinds of habitation where inner-city dwellers adapt ex-office or commercial spaces, and where suburban homes double as offices. Envisaging telephone table, for instance, as a piece of furniture for a refitted apartment, Irving recycles an ordinary plaster ceiling tile into a table-top. Originally designed for sound-proofing, the tile’s holes and indentations serve a purely aesthetic purpose as a table-top, requiring design solutions such as the glass cover for the table to achieve functionality.

Found here, in the context of the art gallery, the objects ask to be considered not only as furniture, but as pieces of sculpture invested with a conceptual basis. Some pieces appear to invite the viewer to use them—the bottle opener is provided if you want to have a beer, rap artist expert will amplify your voice if you speak into the microphone, and the TV is on even though it’s facing the ground. But, paradoxically, the objects also make that invitation uncertain—helping yourself to a Lion Brown in a gallery would feel almost base and rap artist expert is so low-tech that it’ll make little difference to your rap. Inverted TV on steel frame and plinth also subverts its apparent use, turned upside down as a challenge to the visual pull TV’s have in the domestic environment—the way they seem to suck the attention of anyone in the room. As a whole, Nothing Less hovers between promoting a recycled usefulness and a subversion of functionality.

Rebecca Wilson