Jared Peters’ Just as it should be at the McIntosh Gallery.

Surrealist of the bland unconscious

Car seats, toilets, bars of soap, sinks and industrial tiles. These are the dominant subjects of Jared Peters' Just as it should be at the McIntosh Gallery. Toilet is indicative of the show as a whole. Muted in colour, geometrical but soft on line and sitting with slight unease in a boxy but not quite square canvas space. It's a lot of not quite ball-in-a-box. Viewed from above, the toilet has only a subtle sense of depth. Like the sink in the painting beside it, the flattening wins out. With careful attention to the detail of floor tiles, it is also the decorative which dominates. This is only accented by the striking lack of any excretion in the toilet: just the twists of some paper rendered like the wrinkles of a shirt. While the clean/filth divide has been fairly overstated by anthropologists since at least Mary Douglas' seminal, if simplistic, Purity and Danger, there is remarkably little of the latter in evidence. Instead, it's a world so decontaminated that the only sense of life is the murkiness of its colour scheme.

Dave Kemp: The things you know but cannot explain at The McIntosh Gallery.

Dave Kempꞌs PHD exhibition The things you know but cannot explain at The McIntosh Gallery includes two sets of photographs, a video series and one long-playing video work. One set of images were taken using the one pixel camera which the artist designed and built. Its severe restrictions create monochromes which are actually captures of deliberately clichéd subject matter (sunsets, birthday parties, Niagara Falls etc.). Facing these images is the Locations series which pictures banal landscapes, unremarkably composed and framed. The video works all play on boredom: watching water boil, watching paint dry, watching the grass grow etc. These idiomatic capsules of boredom are rendered literally and played out in time. The idiomatic aspect insists on their familiarity. Their literalizing seeks to actualize the rhetoric, passing from figure to phenomena.