Sista Pratesi: The Living End

Sista Pratesi makes art-as-artefact: sculptures and paintings that counterfeit the products of some vanished past or still-to-come civilisation. The first thing a viewer encounters here, a suspended carved-wood frame strung with cascades of blonde hair and glowingly accented with fluorescent spray-paint, splits the difference between dreamcatcher and inter-dimensional portal. What follows are numerous ambiguous anthropological offcuts, including a narrow black pyramid (also festooned with hair) and stunted wooden totems; and wan portraits of women, striking Olympian poses or with features attenuated into near-abstraction. Who lives, or will live, in a world like this?

The question doesn't present itself very forcefully, simply because what Pratesi's objects really resemble is, well, contemporary art. Her 1970s wood veneers, ochre-toned craft aesthetic and intermittently witchy tenor make Pratesi dangerously easy to bracket alongside Carol Bove and Eva Rothschild, while the time-warped objects conceit has been well rehearsed by artists (eg Steve Claydon) and curators alike.

The other angle here is the object as embodiment of an emotional state, whose effectiveness is pretty hard to audit on a case-by-case basis. Nevertheless, sometimes Pratesi achieves genuinely absorbing estrangement, as in a forebodingly blank painting of an octagonal form enclosing what might be an inchoate face. But mostly, in positioning herself outside the current moment, she ends up being definitively of it.