Away: Art Jericho (From The Oxford Times)

Away: Art Jericho

1:41pm Wednesday 1st August 2012 in Weekend & Leisure By Anne James

Away brings together work by photographers Sharon Boothroyd and Tim Crooks. They both explore aspects of dislocation, vulnerability and absence.

Boothroyd’s series, If you get married again will you still love me?, is based on interviews with separated fathers and their children. It includes images of dads confused about how to provide a nice time while setting boundaries and of children’s disappointment when dads couldn’t or didn’t show up.

In #1 (above) the little boy and his reflection summarise his unresolved turmoil and conflicting emotions.

Boothroyd used actors to stage each piece, informed by her research with separated dads and kids. Every portrait is housed in an impersonal setting: a formal room, an anonymous caravan, a family sports changing room. Each provides the context for poignant, moving and unresolved messages.

Tim Crooks’s photographic essay on West Park Asylum records the reality of the now empty building that housed 2,000 inmates in its heyday. Crooks was given access after all had moved on, leaving behind testaments to the diminished humanity of the inmates and the corroded grandeur of the wards. In #17 a commode sits in a derelict ward, symbolic of the enforced lack of dignity accorded to residents. In #23 empty beds, lockers and cabinets line up on a wet floor, the water giving the whole a mocking palazzo-style grandeur.

Boothroyd’s work has a similar poignancy representing as it does the pain that the vulnerable — in this case large numbers of children — carry when their lives are dislocated.

Till August 19. Wed-Sat and Sun afternoon.