SUB ROSA

26 TREDEGAR SQUARE

Bow in east London has undergone dramatic changes since the 1990s, when Rachel Whiteread's House (1993) held its silent vigil in Mile End Park. Piers Gough's scenic bridge and the numerous restaurants, estate agents and renovated Georgian terraces, which have since appeared in the area, testify to the increasing presence of an affluent middle-class.

One of the most beautiful squares is Tredegar off the Mile End Road. In March this year, in one of its larger houses on the north side, a small group of artists installed a collection of works, which according to the press release 'explore relationships between private and public ... [and] leave personal marks on an intimate setting, much like the child who sneaks into Mother's best room wearing muddy shoes'. Anyone expecting to encounter something vaguely subversive was likely to be disappointed, though. Most works were polite, some discreet almost to the point of invisibility, and others could easily have been part of the existing decor, which mixed 19th-century frescos with contemporary minimalist design.

The installation, which contained works made in response to the setting as well as existing pieces, was arranged by Michael Gough, also one of the artists. Gough paints small-scale watercolours of tower and office blocks in oval formats, with soft tones and colours that bleed over the edges, on large sheets of thick, white paper. These were unframed and tacked to the walls with pins on several floors of the house. But there was nothing untidy here; despite the hard-edged character of the architecture, the images were tasteful and appealing.

Whether intended or not, it was hard to resist making a connection between the two works, assuming that the couple in the film were in a similar state of displacement, though their condition was essentially passive and comfortable, as people tend to be on trains, rather than lost or questing. On another wall, an intricate pencil drawing by Roger Kelly, executed in a network of undifferentiated fine pink lines, appeared to depict an architectural facade and possibly part of a garden, but was too dense to decipher. Taped to a glass panel on the floor above, but visible from below, was a partly torn photographic image ripped from a magazine, representing a different tangled garden and the printed words: 'I wanted to combine a Polynesian island feel with the quality and luxury of a five-star hotel'. Part of an installation by Kerry Duggan, this was initially combined with various glossy lifestyle magazines opened at random and strewn over the glass roof of the lower ground floor extension, but were later removed on account of the weather. One imagines that they conveyed a somewhat chaotic, though far from inappropriate, quality in what was otherwise an immaculate domestic setting,

perhaps subtly commenting on the way of life it represented - its free-ranging, casual choice of styles culled from different centuries and cultures, combined with the freedom not to have to really inhabit any of them. In all these pieces there was a sense of architecture or environment observed, but kept at a comfortable distance.

Upstairs in the 18th-century living room, a sculpture Hang it a/I (2005) by Paul Hosking - consisting of painted steel rods with coloured wooden balls on the ends pointing in multiple directions, one of which acted as a hook far a jacket (a model for a technological device such as a satellite or radio transmitter, an Eames-type piece of functional modernist design21- shared the space with a pair of electromagnets resting on the top of a pillar by Ben Woodeson, gently tapping out in Morse code the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the elegant emptiness and quiet of the room, the two pieces struck an incongruous, though not uncomfortable, note - a combination of low- and high-tech communication systems both serious and playful. Meanwhile, on the landing outside,

a radio transmitter scarcely larger than a pea, entitled never mind that noise you heard and also by Woodeson, sat atop another pillar while picking up and transmitting the ambient sounds of the house to a collection of speakers hung on lampposts around the square outside, thereby disrupting the inviolability of the interior.

In an age when there are few opportunities for artists to situate their works in private settings, projects such as 'Sub Rosa' are valuable. Moreover, apart from so-called public art, how often does the average viewer get to see contemporary art beyond the confines of the white space? However, one couldn't help wishing for an experience that was slightly less tentative, for an exhibition whose remit went further than respectful, belonging or subtle intervention. If art is to be a temporary visitor in such contexts, there is also a case for posing more awkward questions, far works that genuinely unsettle the comfortable assumptions of middle-class private space.

Davina Thackara