Sifting through noise
are frames of waking life. People don’t float in a darkened lushly painted space (reminding you of small visual subconscious speech bubbles); rather scenes of slices of life are revealed as whole shots. But not the niceties of the family photo album, rather these are odd unsettling views – protests, riots, slumbering hippies and the madness of a crowd at the Rugby Sevens – certainly just as psychologically high pitched as any dream, and gathered together they have a sort of anthropological fascination.
It’s a bit like an Edwardian exhibition of two headed animals. We sense a certain fascination but of that sort of repellent kind. Pick’s methodology, of a sort of cut and paste, lends itself to this. She is a ‘‘collector’’, finding images of interest (Pick sifting through the noise you could say) and then putting them together into a study. If there is discord or some weirdness of what might be linked together it is much the better.
These series explore contemporary life; the figures are a part of ‘now’, with cell phones, depictions of texting, socialising and partying. But also she dives into a fascination with the counter culture of the 60s and 70s – half naked dancing figures seeking freedom of expression amidst crowds and sunshine, group hugs and retreats. They are researched through the internet using search engines, to explore (from the comfort of an arm chair) the oddities of culture.
Take for example the series in the room labelled ‘‘wankered’’. It began when Pick googled the phrase ‘‘people lying down’’ giving a glut of images, mostly of people inebriated and passed out. It demonstrates this weird use of the internet as a public diary that anyone can tap into. In Pick’s hands they are rendered into curious sprawling studies of popular culture in a world that many of us chose to ignore.
Although the psychological surreal quality of these is still common ground the colour palette she uses in many works has changed considerably. This use of pastels I find the hardest of all the changes to like. While before they were mostly darker hued (and don’t dreams come out at night rather than in fierce daylight), a very successful method in the way the colour punched over the dark. Without these dark tones the works seem to become strangely blurred and vague, meant I am