If you spent your formative years in the type of school where you wore a sweatshirt and not a blazer, then chances are your memories of educational architecture involve two things: fluorescent strip lights and white, plastic blinds bashed-up and half-hanging from the window.
The four installations, all called ‘Shutter’, in Angela de la Cruz’s exhibition at Lisson Gallery bring to mind both paltry protection for shopfronts and those very same perennially broken window coverings favoured by the Department of Education.
As such, there’s something a bit depressing about them and the way they collapse down. Everything else on display also looks like it’s on its way to the knackers yard. A glossy painting titled ‘Bare (Red)’ has been sliced from its own frame, leaving the rough-edged canvas to hang forlornly as though it’s slipping out of itself.
Elsewhere, four free-standing sculptures (all called ‘Crate’) make use of three-sided aluminium cuboids (former filing cabinets), crumbling inwards, so that the metal looks as pliable as tin foil.
Shown within the same small room of Lisson’s Bell Street space, this exhibition doesn’t quite place the works in their best light – it feels too cramped in here. But the concept behind the exhibition – the word ‘bare’ – really works. The sagging, fraying and denting tally up neatly with the artist’s themes of exposure and vulnerability.
There’s also another way of understanding all this semi-dereliction. The caved-in filing cabinets look like they’ve got the weight of the world on their metallic shoulders and yet, they’re still standing. Like the local comp avoiding being Ofsted-ed into Special Measures, they’re bearing up. Just.