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"More than any other that I have seen this year, this exhibition reflects contemporary urban
existence. A series of paintings of equal dimensions (roughly the dimensions of a 35mm film neg)
run as a series around the gallery's walls. Each portrays a flash of an object - a hat, an insect,
a mannequin, a traffic light. From the intimate encounter with the curve of a door handle or an
edge of a knife, they pan out to the corner of a building, to a holiday in India and back again.
As the eye tracks along this flickering of objects - some exotic, mostly mundane, it builds as
the recollection of a day, a month, of memories suspended and possessions half remembered.

The obsessive categorisation of each object, in a text below it, belies a desperate attempt to hold
on to them as experience. For as the eye progresses along these fragments - now caught in memory,
now in peripheral vision, it conjures up a ride to work in the subway, when a reverie of memory is
time and again punctuated by the clutter of familiar objects on billboards which signpost our progress
to our usual destination. Or channel surfing in a dispirited search for adventure on a quiet Monday night.
Advertised products reflected through the compressed non-space of the underground window, or scanned
past in compressed non-time screen of remote control, crowd and jumble the memories of objects we have
held, of experience recounted. Life blurs with mass produced memories as recollections of objects surface.
In Davenport's paintings, as seen on TV, these objects flicker and replay."

The author of this review, Jillian Hamilton, is an academic based in Brisbane, Australia


As Seen on TV series was later shown installed in this format at London Stock Exchange

© all images copyright
owned by the artist
Sarah Davenport