Sweet Sweet Galaxy - Pip & Pop with John Kassab. Smiths Row, 22nd Jan - 26th Feb

I found it hard to define reality in one corner of East Anglia this January.

When arriving at Smiths Row, Bury St Edmunds newly named gallery space, you find it in total keeping with its surroundings and like this quaint historic English market town Robert Adams Georgian affair is visually pretty, compact and bijou.

The institutes’ main gallery however provides the audience with another, if a bit more ramped up idyll. This time there’s green and orange sand dunes, rainbow coloured trees, day-glow glaciers, acid pink waterfalls and other topo-popsicle features on a polished wooden floor, all looking sweet enough to make a gallery visitors’ fillings fallout at the sight of it all. This toxic landscape aberration is the work of Australian artists Tanya Schultz and Nicole Andrijevic, who with fellow antipodean sound buddy John Kassab have created their Sweet sweet galaxy, a large floor based installation of approximately 4M² constructed from found objects, cake decorations, coloured sugar, sand and origami. Kassab infusing the whole with his synthetic soundscape of digital pulses and reverbs.

Schultz and Andrijevic, better known as Pip and Pop have since 2007 primarily worked together in their home country receiving modest critical acclaim for their work, encompassing installation, drawing and photography, whilst Kassab a Melbourne based sound designer and music composer collaborates with the pair for the second time, his last being back in 2008. Coming into this exhibition on a typical non-descript grey mid winters day you are immediately taken aback with firstly the colours on display, a mixture of cheap acidic toy merchandise and Japanese Harajuku Fashion, the latter unsurprising with residential visits and shows within Tokyo in the past few years.

However it’s the placing of Sweet sweet galaxy that intrigues. Situated just under a large Georgian window that dominates the wall, you step into a space of miniature, with the aperture having an almost biblical presence in relation to the sweetie parade below. Added to this is the scene beyond the glass; a series of period building rooftops, a noddyland, of timber beams, pargetting, rustic clay tiles and handcrafted chimneypots forming a backdrop. Having such a surreal juxtaposition only adds to the overall mise en abyme effect of an outsider looking in…then in again and in this respect Sweet sweet galaxy slightly mimics what lies outside (‘Pams’ sweet shop is adjacent to the gallery). Putting the town within a national context size can be seen as linking the two; a mirror of miniature cuteness that Pip and Pop’s intervention highlights successfully.

Gaston Bachelard stated that like Bury folk ‘[he felt] more at home in miniature worlds, which for [him] are dominated worlds [that] helped [him] to resist dissolution’¹, thus experiencing hyper-kitsch rivers and ravines lined with intricate multicoloured flora and fauna could be the results of recreational experimentation gone awry, and after viewing Pip and Pops Lilliputian lollypop landscape in a town famous for its sugar refinery (which the artists used) and still possessing several butchers, bakers and candlestick makers, the dividing line between reality and construct becomes very, very fluffy indeed.

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Beacon Press, p. 161