Time Out London, 15-22 February 2006 Dryden Goodwin **** Reviewed by Helen Sumpter Aided by an eerily layered ambient soundtrack, Dryden Goodwin;s installation, Flight has a dreamlike quality. Beginning with the artist scratchily drawing a series of self-portraits, a short film consists of footage that relates to flight, both as escape and as the physical act of floating through space. Panning up and out of a London tower block, the scene moves to a blur of headlights illuminating a motorway at night to an indistinct face driving a car to a motorway services. Next you’re hovering in forest treetops and zooming through them as if in a computer game before emerging onto grassy cliff tops and floating over a gently rippling grey sea, glinting with sunlight. Rapidly animated pen-and-ink drawings trace elements of the imagery; as you look through the windows of the service station, a web of gestural black lines envelops the heads of individual customers, and in the forest, spidery black lines emerge from a knothole in a tree trunk and spread out to follow patterns of bark. The speed and movement of the animation and the scratching, static-like soundtrack remind one of speeded-up footage of maggots devouring a carcass or the spread of a mould-like virus. In the other half of the gallery, a circle of strongly lit, white display cases show the drawings used in the animation. As if evidence, they reinforce the idea that something strange or otherworldy has taken place. |