The press of Heather & Ivan Morison Publication: Headline: Selected editorial: By Peter Chapman Art can provide its audience with the chance to escape from everyday life, to slip into strange, imagined worlds. The Real Ideal: Utopian Ideals and Dystopian Realities, a collection of contemporary artwork, examines the tensions implicit in various fantasy scenarios. The American photographer Gregory Crewdson's elaborate, highly textured pictures are mini-melodramas. In one, a woman in a negligee sits on the edge of a bed. Is she waiting for her dream lover, or contemplating a bad marriage? Similarly, there is a sense of foreboding in an image by Heather and Ivan Morison. The roses in a vase are beautiful, but what about the dead wood pigeons? It's hard to escape the morbid sense that the flowers will wilt and the birds decay. Elsewhere, Sarah Woodfine gives a fairy-tale castle (right) a Transylvanian feel, while Katie Deith's tropical island appears to have smoke issuing from it. Was there a fire or an explosion? It goes to show that what seems to be heaven can turn out to be hell.
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