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The works in Tim Ellis’ solo show ‘The Tourist’ at Spacex, Exeter prompt narrative responses. Ellis distributes these newly made works across three spaces, each with a character of its own. The pieces are funny, with elements of beauty; they are complex and inspire curiosity, multiplying layers of possible meaning. Ellis’ titles add another layer of suggestion, feeling cut from some longer text, they are propositional rather than definitive.

Room one offers us an exhibition guide in the shape of The Tourist, a brass figure of a day-labourer, dressed not in leisurewear but in long apron and boots. Placed here on a complex plinth, he stands in miniature, but monumentalised. Heavy-shouldered and wearing a soft cap, he might have stepped out of a nineteenth-century realist painting. Perhaps he represents one of those market workers who laboured in the Paris area of Les Halles, before it made way for the Pompidou Centre. Displaced by cultural tourism he reappears here as our guide.

The works in room two, the most domestic of the spaces, suggest the accoutrements of an Edwardian bachelor’s parlour, reminiscent of a pipe rack, billiard cues and library. The recognisable, if not familiar, objects have been modified and extraneous elements added. In Growing Old Together eight wands or walking poles, topped with meerschaum heads, are gathered in an umbrella stand, their varied features offering a set of characters to play out some narrative. They appear as types, characters for a game whose rules are not provided, or a cast in search of a play.

A set of grass and bamboo bookshelves is titled Founding Fathers. Each shelf sports a trophy pair of bookends; on one, twin bulldogs, on another, little gun carriages and cannons. Two eagle heads – escaped from or overlooked by Marcel Broodthaers’ Musee d’Art Moderne, Departement des Aigles – occupy the top shelf, no longer on speaking terms, they face left and right, ghost volumes behind them.

Three copper patens, titled Towards a Common Understanding, each hang from a forged iron nail, specifically mentioned in the list of materials. A nail forged by someone like our ‘Tourist’ from Room One, offering evidence of the labour involved in making a potentially insignificant element of the show. This draws attention to the artist’s work of making, and to the bulldog clips that hold the Backdrop paintings in room three. These incidentals take on significance, becoming clues in the wider game of associations in the exhibition, linked by the Bulldog brand name to a pair of bookends in room two.

In room three are three large banner-like works titled Backdrop: To Live Long and Maybe One Day Forever. We may recognise the material supports of these paintings as duvet covers, king size squares of doubled fabric, with the poppers for the opening evident along their top edge. These utilitarian fabrics have been worked over to transform them into densely weighted drapes, their surfaces thickened and slicked to sheen dully in sky blue, marine blue, or grass green. These tarpaulins have been unfurled, opened for another performance, a seaside sideshow. They propose a Punch and Judy world of funfair and holiday; unpopulated they are open to peopling by the sculptures in the room before them.

These eight assemblages have the air of persons, facing us, listening to us, sounding at us, or giving the impression of these activities while in fact being unseeing, mute or unhearing. One, Interloper, in pale blue and ivory, with a glass head and tapering to narrow feet may be female. Lectern, the tallest, in shades of green, with doubled large enamelled lightshade ‘face’ and doorknob features, is male, and that must be his little daughter with him, Willing Servant in a floor-length skirt.

The titles make this attribution of gender less easy. It is tricky to designate the young girl a ‘willing servant’ as it suggests more complex domestic dramas than the uncomplicated colours of the tourist fantasy encourage. The sculptures also suggest pieces in a board game, chess or Cluedo, with their uprightness, and their round heads. This one here, The Arrival might be the king or queen, with its teapot lid crown. The titles can determine the characters as functions in a drama, with attributes or tasks in some story to be played out by our moving them, our reimagining their provisional relationships.

Tim Ellis’ exhibition ‘The Tourist’ puts in play a drama of emotional labour as the visitors – who, like the artist, are tourists here also -consume the signifying and meaningful objects and installations. Experiences and sensations are proffered which can be enjoyed as we generate stories or rationales for them. ‘The Tourist’ offers the visitor an engagement in aesthetic labour and narrative play, taking on the role both of worker and of leisured participant.

This is an edited version of a review originally posted on www.a-n.co.uk/Interface in March 2011.

a-n.co.uk May 2011