There are two main sources for Tom Dale’s towering sculptural installations ‘The Cow Palace’ and ‘Pacific Coliseum’. The first is the late, great, all-American daredevil, Evel Knievel: the titles refer to venues for his spectacular motorcycle jumps; and the works themselves consist of large, star-spangled ramps, swooping up from the gallery floor towards the rafters of this former church – yet pitched at such extreme, twisting angles as to make riding them an impossible, suicidal act.
Meanwhile, the zigzagging struts that support each structure invoke a second impossible episode, through their resemblance to Vladimir Tatlin’s famous ‘Monument to the Third International’ – that masterpiece of Soviet constructivism which proved beyond the technical capabilities of the time to actually realise.
It can be extremely tricky building a work out of historical references like this, without the end result somehow appearing less than the sum of its parts. Yet with these installations, Dale has managed the feat of producing something that feels snazzy and dynamic, but at the same time utterly despondent. The sense is of differing, contrasting ideologies; of the human need to gloriously commemorate or enact them; and of their eventual failure or disaster – a kind of launchpad, then, for doomed notions of hope and progress, for leaps into the future that end nowhere.
In a nearby hallway, there’s another form of ideological comparison: two small photographs depicting expensive, ostentatious new-builds in a Polish housing estate, whose facades Dale has digitally reconfigured to incorporate blander, identikit designs from the Communist era. But in this instance, unfortunately, the resulting amalgams, for all their illusionistic perfection, simply don’t carry the same kind of discomfiting charge. Sure, the contrasting aesthetics are interesting, but their combination doesn’t really broaden our understanding of either value system much beyond what we already know or assume.