Shannon Oksanen

Shannon Oksanen, through various acts of homage, drags periods of the past into the light already seared onto the collective memory. The Canadian artist’s handmade approximations of iconic objects and imagery appear made with the purpose of exposing the material/contextual recipe responsible for the enduring cultural appeal of say Elvis, French intellectualism or, here at Union, mimimalist artistic enquiry of the 1950s. The sense of nostalgia for another time is palpable yet not always stable enough in reconstruction to satisy the lack of any clear Time Lord logic.

Is this a homage or a send up? At moments one can discern the potential for a point to be made – on the evolution of women’s art practices, perhaps, or contemporary artists’ unmitigated plundering of the past – only to lose the scent in Oksanen’s charmingly flimsy set. The artist poses coquettishly, like Eva Hesse in Converse, on the exhibition card above the show’s title ‘Sculptress’. And the gallery interior, stocked with looky-likey sculptures (Brancusi, Twombly) and props, feels very much like the replication of an image; a romantic Fifties world now more synonymous with black and white film footage and book plates than reality as we know it.

Projected film work, ‘A Little Boat’ (2007), makes the strongest case here for not trying to follow, just experience, Oksanen's backward glance. For it offers the perfect mariage of new and old, the grainy trajectory of a model boat (to sounds from the BBC’s radiophonic workshops) across water provides an ageless metaphor for the perception of the past as relatively simple. The rest just makes one hanker after the real thing.