Pop art for dummies

Neil Hedger: High Society

As a comment on 'high society' decadence, lap dancers and crashed cars don't exactly hit the spot. The smashed model cars - Aston Martins, Porsches and Jaguars - are painted in messy daubs of grey, yellow or blue, and apparently allude to Crash, JG Ballard's disturbing postmodern satire of urban meltdown and high-speed motorway sex.

The lap dancers come as fibre-glass models and dark facsimile duplicates in Warhol shades of saturated colour. A row of mannequin heads are painted in battleship grey and have empty eye sockets and pouting mouths. Their banana yellow hair sits like bad-fitting wigs, reminiscent of those old-fashioned dummies in cut-price boutiques that haven't seen a change of decor since the 1970s.

Hedger's party piece is Candy, a life-size lap dancer who bends over to reveal her crotch as she teeters on blue platform heels. But tattier than the displays are Hedger's hackneyed ideas. Heavily influenced by Allen Jones's sexualised mannequins, this is defunct pop art with pretensions. It may be aiming to be deliberately retro, in the kind of ironic way that alludes to the thin veneer of a sort of high-maintenance trashy glamour. But it's also rather confused in its social readings.

You just can't help leaving the gallery thinking that this is an artist whose adolescent reading of Ballard impressed him for all the wrong reasons - and I'll bet he drives a Volvo.

Until April 13, the.gallery@oxo, Oxo Tower Wharf, Bargehouse Street SE1, daily 11am to 6pm, free. Tel: 020 7401 3610. Tube: Waterloo