RSA: New Contemporaries

There are exhibitions that shout, and there are those that talk. If you can recall the 2009 RSA New Contemporaries exhibition, you might not unfairly remember it as an example of the former. This is not necessarily a criticism. Loud exhibitions can be just as effective as subtler or quieter ones, if only because their statements are more clearly heard. Nevertheless, the clamouring of artistic voices in that earlier exhibition may have been at times just a little too noisy or distracted - the central room's sculptural confrontation between an enormous inflatable foetus and an equally gigantic orange crane, for example. This year’s exhibition is quite different. It retains the spirit and energy of the previous student exhibitions, but presents it in a more restrained way. Individual voices are of course still competing, but do so more harmoniously. This is an exhibition that talks.

The tension between the individual and the ‘group’ is perhaps inevitable in any group show, and it is the balancing of the two elements that is this exhibition’s great curatorial strength. The conscious notion of the ‘individual’ – itself an inevitable trope – underlies much of the work. Jacqueline Shortland’s human-sized reflective ‘I’ offers a neat expression of this in the first room. Downstairs, Omar Zingaro Bhatia’s 'Spuriosity Shop' is a less subtle examination of a similar concept.

Harriet Lowther’s 'Big Thankyou Project', which gained considerable coverage after Glasgow’s degree show last year, approaches the ‘individual’ from a different angle. Her works consists of over 200 framed ‘thank-you’ letters (and their responses) to the large and ‘impersonal’ companies that provide the products and services of day-to-day life. The child-like enthusiasm of Lowther’s letters, coupled with the huge and ridiculous range of their addressees (from Glasgow Council refuse collection to the makers of Carex hand gel) gives the project an edgy or potentially sarcastic quality, and is made more interesting by doing so.

The full scope and variation of New Contemporaries cannot be done justice here, and there are many pieces that deserve a mention. Ernesto Canovas’s mushroom-cloud paintings are notable for their sophisticated execution; Jessica Ramm’s kinetic sculptures for the same reason. Rachael Mclean’s video work, the strangeness of which defies proper description, makes an impact here as it has elsewhere. Downstairs further examples of excellent video pieces abound: both Max Swinton’s Mr Fox and Jenny Hood’s Theatres of Nature interesting and original. Even more striking, at least in terms of imagery, is Selena S Kuzman’s 'F’(x)= 0 – Dionysian', with the exhibition’s dramatic frontispiece taken from this work.

It is testament to the skill of the curators as well as to the individual artists that a show that is as large and as varied as this one can hang together coherently. The works do not shout for our attention, but rather encourage it with their physical and conceptual relationships with one another, and are made more effective by that subtlety.