NOW, the latest group show at Manchester’s Saul Hay Gallery, is an apposite naming in more ways than one.

While still a going concern (currently in its 119th iteration), readers of a certain age will recall NOW as the title of a series of compilation LPs, beginning in 1983, collecting the biggest hits of the day. The parallels with this fine collection, curated from the work of recent graduates of Manchester School of Art, speak for themselves. Indeed, as with that first album in the NOW series, each visitor is likely to bring their own perspective as to which of the artists represented here is their personal visual equivalent to the giddily magnificent debut of electro-influenced breakdancers Rock Steady Crew, and which their drearily workmanlike Paul Young, purveyor of inexplicably popular suburban white ‘soul’. Each, in their respective ways, is already a hit.  

The constraints of word count, moreover, like the limits imposed by the running time of a blank cassette, necessitate that the selections for my own metaphorical mix tape are partial, representing the unfamiliar, perhaps, at the expense of better-known names, foregrounding singularity as much, if not more so, than virtuosity.  

With their hints of sepia, Zoe Steele’s series of postcard-sized monochromes evoke the cramped compromises of a drab English Bank Holiday, in which the distinction between leisure as a source of either enjoyment or endurance is obscured like rain-washed ink. Like the song by Japan, particularly in the absence of the vacationers themselves, hunkered down away from the squalls inside their parked-up caravans, these works have the contradictory quality of still lives in mobile homes.  

Jenny Stavers also articulates the everyday and the mundane, albeit with one eye on the romance of public transport. Her interiors, too, are uninhabited, but the ghosts of commuters past make themselves manifest in the idle traces of hearts marked out against the mist of condensation on a window looking out into rainy darkness. The humanising touch works against the cliché of Manchester as the city of perpetual rain, her oils slick and colourful, enabling it to be seen anew.  

If Stavers’ works hold out at least the possibility of connection, Cal Cole’s photographic prints articulate the dehumanising effect of a city skyline as bleak as a fog-wreathed November, built to an oppressive scale. By contrast, his models of the unapologetically gauche Salford Shopping City tower, as distinctive as a stick of rock, and its less-lovely counterpart, the Arndale, lit from within, seem almost homely; for all the concrete severity of their originals, by contrast with the unflinching glass of their contemporary descendants, they seem positive beacons of humanity.  

Less indebted to realism is Sarah Marie Rowlands. At first glance, Cubicles is as unremarkable as unoccupied toilet stalls on an institutional scale. A closer inspection reveals them as being precariously situated in spaces which have begun to come adrift from the security of three dimensions, the interior collapsing into the wider exterior, letting the night in as though to provide the setting for a dream of disquiet.  

The work which most caught me off guard, Omid Asadi’s Fortune Teller, shares this allusive quality, instead radiating a numinous potency, arising somehow from the thoughtful placement of a video film within a canvas of flickering saffron. Like the footage of crystal ball reading that plays out on it, its strange juxtapositions require the intuitive sensitivities of the Tarot reader. This resistance to rationality, to being reduced to the sum of its parts, lends it an animation that sets it apart from its peers. It’s fitting, then, that Asadi was named as Independent Creative of the Year at the recent Manchester Culture Awards. 

There are big hits, too, from Georgie Hustler, represented here by her Did She Actually Say That in which Instagram instantaneity is set against the painstaking approach of the Middle Ages, as well as Rachel Clancy’s unhomely interiors. Ultimately, however, each viewer will have their own pick for number one, a different track listing on their mix tape.  

The one constancy is the overall quality. With a NOW that pulses with promise, all eyes are on what happens next. 

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent 

Main image: Omid Asadi’s Fortune Teller, acrylic and video on canvas. All images courtesy of Saul Hay Gallery. 

 

 

NOW by Manchester School of Art graduates is at Saul Hay Gallery, Manchester until December 7, 2024. For more information, click here.