Presented alongside three of his epic-scale paintings, Tom Ellis's handcrafted furnishings take on an air of the defunct. Gesturing towards the grandiose or aristocratic, and transforming the gallery into a stage-set of a stately room, or a mock-up of a corporate lobby, the excellence of this installation lies in its artworks' resistance to be useable or readable.
'Unsubtle Table' presents a low, broad plane of grey glass sloping gently towards the floor. With two legs missing, this sleek coffee table – a form reminiscent of the resplendent surfaces of minimalist sculpture – is useless. Similarly Ellis's 'Chair Table Prototype No 1', which draws influence from Edwardian armchairs, is a throne-like hybrid that can be used either as a seat or table, but not both at once.
Matching the upholstery of two 1920s-style day beds, painted in a lurid green, 'The Gypsy Mother' is a rough copy of a painting by nineteenth-century Austrian artist August von Pettenkofen. A messy abstraction of a peasant scene, this blunt personal approximation evades the precision of the original painter. Similarly, Ellis's two other canvases have been executed with such loose brushwork as to render their figures effectively undetectable.
With objects succumbing to their own built-in failures and paintings that struggle to assert themselves in the face of their own copyist approach, here, Ellis's art seems difficult and under strain. Something of this condition pushes the viewer to look outside and to realise that, ingeniously, these works sit both within a multinational financial news corporation, and opposite the last remaining Occupy London camp in Finsbury Square.