RUSE: the artfulness of deceit at The Holden Gallery
Polly Checkland Harding
There’s an easy link to be made between this exhibition and How much of this is fiction at FACT in Liverpool: both interrogate questions of reality, truth and authority. However, where How much of this is fiction has a particularly political bent, Ruse at The Holden Gallery is focused on the use of illusion, diversion and transformation to manipulate people and things more generally. Take Clare Strand’s Conjurations, a series of four films depicting women performing commonplace magic tricks on a loop; capitalising on the expectation of deception that we have when it comes to magic, Conjurations instead invokes the mystery of how a trick is done.
Bridget Smith’s photographs, meanwhile, re-stage our understanding of space, photographing familiar environments of escape (such as a cinema, theatre and pleasure resort) into images that echo the sea, the movement of waves and a bygone era. The ‘trick’ here is that environments usually associated with fantasy, imagination and escapism themselves become transformed. Also on display is the complete series of Outrageous Fortune Tarot Cards, a reinterpretation by 78 contemporary artists of the classic Tarot de Marseille deck of cards – associated with both card games, tricks and fortune telling. Together, the five lead artists who make up Ruse present a compelling argument: that ideas of reality are only a matter of belief.
