“Abstract, garish and Frankenstein-esque”: Jamie Green @ Flat Gallery

Entering Flat Gallery, set (unsurprisingly) inside a residential flat in Glasgow, it is understandable why artists have regularly struggled with the space’s layout.

This issue however has previously been successfully broached by a number of artists who have chosen to incorporate artworks into the space using a wide range of thoughtful and highly playful techniques that has allowed works to appear natural within the space.

For the exhibition ‘Feel like pure shit just want her back x’, Glasgow-based artist Jamie Green appears to ignore the limitations of the space through a series of bold sculptures, video works and paintings – filling the space to the point of abject saturation and leaving the viewer overwhelmed, confused and questioning the artist’s ability to edit.

The exhibition brings together several seemingly unrelated bodies of work, including a number of paintings resembling images from the iPhone’s ‘Maps’ app, recreated using colour-matched paint on wooden panels. The paintings are detailed replicas but do not feature the pulsating blue location marker – suggesting the viewer must construct their own embodiment in the landscape. The most notable work within the series is ‘Hay Bales,’ with its interesting selection of abstract topographic features and title alluding to Constable’s ‘The Hay Wain.’

These paintings have little in common with the works encountered in the main, larger gallery space where ten sculptures of differing sizes stand on plinths of white A4 paper, making all ten sculptures the same height. These abstract and garishly coloured works are made from a selection of mass-produced objects encased within plaster and foam before being reconfigured as Frankenstein-esque totems, embracing consumer culture and cheap manufacturing yet offering little else.

Scattered between the sculptures lays an Apple Macbook on the floor, appearing to type out a number of text works by itself, before importing them into Photoshop and ‘enhancing’ the text pieces – adding colour, changing the layout, font, size etc. The texts, though mildly humorous at times, are often banal, and their attempts to suggest grand narratives and ideas at times lapse into the contrived, offering little more than a moment of titillation found on shared Tumblr post.