Art

As a hybrid of book publishing imprint and gallery, Trolley doesn’t do a bad job. While the meat of the business is the books, and Trolley has won numerous awards for its mainly photography and social reportage-based publications, the gallery shifts between showcasing photographers they’ve worked with and emerging fine artists. For this group show they’ve combined the two with the theme of the body after death.

In mood, many of these works couldn’t be more different; collective Le Gun’s graphic style drawings of characters in their coffins and Robert Gordon McHarg III’s rock painted to resemble a skull, take an essentially  light-hearted approach to the corporeal afterlife. Other works are more enigmatic – Nick Reynolds’s sculpture cast of an armadillo (an animal associated with Texas) with the death mask of an executed prisoner from that state grafted on to its back is particularly strange and unsettling, while Boo Saville’s anthropologcial drawings of skulls and bodies preserved in bogs are remarkable for the detail and range of subtle tones she has managed to extract from a Biro.

The straight photojournalism, whch in many ways is the strongest work, fares least well in this mixed context. Alixandra Fazzina’s image of the white corpse of a Miya-Miya fighter from the Democratic Republic of Congo, preserved in lime before burial, and George Osodi’s blackened skeleton, illustrating the casualties of Nigeria’s oil business, are part of larger bodies of work and leave you wanting to see more – or perhaps as Trolley hopes – also tempted to buy the book.