Mel Jackson

MEL Jackson's offering for last summer's "young Kerlin" show, Casting Pearls, was a highly polished affair, intense in its precision…

MEL Jackson's offering for last summer's "young Kerlin" show, Casting Pearls, was a highly polished affair, intense in its precision and its slipperiness. For her Project show, British born Jackson has turned in two installations with a dirty, distinctly improvisational, feel.

A sheet of paper offering brief reviews of the two works (written by Jackson herself) is available in the gallery. Perhaps, however, the text is yet another destabilising element in a show that seems to circle around an investigation of trust, belief and faith.

For After the Conjuror, Jackson has erected wooden shuttering (of a type usual, around building sites) across the larger of the Project's two gallery spaces. Fly posted on the bare wood is a reproduction of "Bosch's The Conjurer" in which "the performer is somewhere between mountebank and a divinator". A soundtrack plays on which can be heard the call of a barker, clearly comprehensible even without the benefit of understanding the language he speaks. Presumably an English translation would run "roll up, roll up".

Visitors who wander behind the screen will eventually meet a video monitor on which plays a loop featuring a kneeling three card trickster plying his trade. Jackson offers just a few moments, but, nevertheless it seems, if the visitor concentrates, it is possible to make the link between the subterfuges at the heart of this art, and most art.

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In the dimly lit back gallery, a second installation, The Woman from Camarata, involving text, slide, video and sound elements again, examines anecdotes in which the faith and belief are key. Jackson seems to make the assumption here that repetition is akin to explication. Anything, the installation lacks in precision is, however, more than compensated for by the accompanying text, which even goes as far as beginning a sentence "What is significant here

Perhaps what is, called tot is a little more taciturnity to go along, with Jackson's evident cunning.