People are strange

Becky Beasley Spring Rain, Spike Island (2013)

I find myself asking if it's possible to see a bad show at Spike Island. There's something about the gallery spaces - so generous, so bright, so peacefully focused on the business of good art - that everything feels right within them. 

Becky Beasley's 'Spring Rain' is a great example. From the cucumber-coloured linoleum in the first part (with the footprint of Duchamp's Etant Donnes inset in black) to a pair of gently rotating black lacquered objects at the end, the show is sparse and yet rich with connections, complex and yet easy to engage with.

At its heart is the theme of pairings - male and female, his and hers, peg and hole, positive and negative, object and cast. There's a bawdy humour at work, but only of the gentlest sort. It's almost as if Beasley has put Duchamp's voyeurism and potential misogyny back in its (surprisingly small) box.  This is England. This is domesticity. This is comical home-grown veg and married sex.

Large-scale hand-coloured photographs of curly cucumbers and spinning casts of tiny brass gherkins sit alongside images of a tablecloth and a handkerchief, both of which have mysterious yet apparently functional holes at their centres. The title of the show is taken from an affecting short story by Bernand Malamud that touches on distance and intimacy - the fragile connections between self and others.

In an interesting move, Beasley has chosen works by Richard Hamilton and Charles Jones to accompany her show. Hamilton's precise and witty photographic montages echo her concerns with interior space, but it's the photographs of everyday vegetables by Jones that best match her emotional timbre. Never exhibited in his lifetime, the images were only discovered by accident in 1981 in a suitcase at a Bermondsey antiques market. They are so intimate and tender they could almost be classed as portraits.

'Spring Rain' shows alongside the fascinating video installation 'Back to Back' by Uriel Orlow, which utilises sound bleed between two video pieces to talk about the past haunting the present in Armenia/Turkey.  Runs 26 January - 31 March 2013 at Spike Island.

I also visited the rather chaotic 'No Borders' at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery (until 2 June) featuring Ai Weiwei's Ton of Tea and Yto Barrada's Sleepers.  And 'Version Control' at the Arnolfini (2 February -14 April), a survey of performance, performance documentation and appropriation in contemporary practice.  There was too much to take in during one short, crowded visit,  but I especially liked Eva & Franco Mattes' The Others. This collection of appropriated personal photographs and song recordings found on other people's hard drives was oddly touching.  It seemed to tie up perfectly with Becky Beasley's reflections on the familiarity and strangeness of other people.