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 nayland blake
 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.Gnome truths at London’s Fred gallery. According to his London gallery, this exhibition explores Nayland Blake’s emotional state in response to the death of his partner of 11 years. Yet it’s hard to see this in the conceptual installations and very personal visual language he uses.There’s an obvious debt to Paul McCarthy’s sculptural Disney play-pop style. Blake is specifically excited by gnomes. Those little men with beards that embody kitsch are replicated in frenzied drawings and attached to metallic tree sculptures like leaves hanging on steel branches. Most memorably, a white T-shirt in a glass box emblazoned with the cream text “Gnome Fiddler”, and decorated with browning dried semen. It raises a smile if nothing else. Other photographic and video pieces less successfully explore queer conscious imagery – drawing on Al Pacino looking like a moody rent boy dragging on a cigarette in the 1980 movie Cruising, or the language of Derek Jarman’s Blue. The show leaves the viewer a little empty and confused. There’s something here, but what it is god only knows. Nayland Blake: The Expulsion From The Garden is at Fred, London, until 30 July 06.
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