Review: Junk in the Yard, Flowers East
The waste land. Don't Miss . . . 'Says the Junk in the Yard'.

If you happen to glance through the glass facade of Flowers East over the next few weeks, you'll see a crazy woman has broken in. The skinny Hoxton type (stilettos, metallic jeans) stands in the middle of one room in a sort of trance with her arms in the air, apparently worshipping at the shrine of a houseplant surrounded by empty cigarette packets and beer cans. In another room, somebody seems to be roughing it on the floor in a dusty black sleeping bag. Ah, the charms of the Kingsland Road.

Look a little closer and the charms reveal themselves. The apparently wasted raver is artist Kimberley Clark's sculpture " 'I'll Be Back' Terminator 2007" and the rough sleeper a bronze by Gavin Turk, both star turns in a dazzling waste- themed exhibition. Says the Junk in the Yard, the show's title, hails from a 1968 Beatles song that, while not making the final recording of The White Album, was a snappy commentary on an increasingly throwaway culture.

It seems precocious that the Fab Four were singing nearly 40 years ago about what is one of today's hottest global issues. In the visual art world, however, Marcel Duchamp had already made a statement about the junk in his yard in 1917 with "Fountain", made from a discarded urinal. Junk as art is as establishment as it gets these days and the inclusion of artists such as Eduardo Paolozzi and Peter Blake, as well as the innate seriousness of the subject, make this show more heavyweight than one might expect.

While sculpture entertains, it is in the medium of photography that the subject finds its most articulate expression. Whether in the bleakness of Mikhael Subotsky's images of a South African rubbish dump, the wry humour of Jason Oddy's snaps of toppling towers of Mr Kipling packets, or the jumbled geometry of Sophie Gerrard's photos of a computer scrapyard in Bangalore, the breadth of the issue is quite clear.Like it or not, these are increasingly the landscapes and still-lifes of the 21st century.

'Says the Junk in the Yard' is at Flowers East,London E2, until September 8, tel: +44 (0)20-7920 7777; www.flowerseast.com