Body Conscious at The Approach

Entry: Free

The Approach is a tiny gallery about a 10 minute walk from Bethnal Green tube station. It's above a pub - The Approach Tavern - which you have to go through to get to the gallery. Curiously, the gallery's website doesn't mention this quite important fact at all, meaning you can spend several puzzled minutes walking up and down the street if you don't already know where it is.

This was the penultimate day of Alice Channer's solo exhibition, Body Conscious. When I was first heard about the exhibition I was told something along the lines of “it's a collection of dresses based on snake skins”. The press release quickly corrected that mistake though; a better description would have been “a collection of works based on dresses with reptile-skin prints”.

Except that's not entirely accurate either. Channer has made some of the works, (primarily Tight Skin, Deep Skin and Second Skin), by duplicating, manipulating and transforming reptile-skin prints taken from mass-market clothes. However, other works, (such as Slip), are completely different. When I read the press release I thought it was strange that it was so careful to explain how the works were connected, but I realised why on seeing the exhibition: with several of the pieces so firmly based around the modified prints, those pieces that don't appear to share this basis make the exhibition as a whole feel slightly disjointed.

The focus of Channer's work - according to the press release at least - is the body, but “the body itself is never represented. … Instead, it is mediated and extended by technology and commodified.” Can you make something the focus of your work if you never represent it? More importantly, can you actually comment on the commodification of something if you don't represent it? Perhaps there's a conclusion to be drawn about how the commodification of the body distances us from it; perhaps I should just avoid reading pretentious press releases in future.

Most of the works in Body Conscious can be seen at The Approach's website. While I think this show lacked unity – a problem made worse by how strongly unified several of the pieces were – I did enjoy it. I like Channer's approach of taking existing objects and creating something genuinely new with them through technological processing. I'll be very interested to see what she does next.