28 February 2013 at 6pm
In our February 2013 Spin event, we will be visiting the New Work Scotland Programme: Conor Kelly and Calvin Laing exhibition at the Collective Gallery. Kate Gray, Director of the Collective Gallery, will join us in discussing the two artists selected for the exhibition, the New Work Scotland programme and the plans for the gallery’s move to Calton Hill in later this year.
New Work Scotland is a Collective initiative recognised as giving artists based in Scotland their first significant visual art project or commission. Through an annual open application, NWSP identifies and supports some of the most promising new practitioners working in the visual arts in Scotland, providing them with the opportunity to make new work and bring it to the attention of a wider public.
Conor Kelly graduated in 2008 from the MFA course at Glasgow School of Art and for this exhibition he has produced new series of paintings and sculptures. As part of his exhibition, Kelly will also present a ‘ready-made’ sculpture; La Tour de Travail (The Tower of Labour), named after Rodin’s ornate maquette for a monumental folly to labour.
Calvin Laing graduated with BA (Hons) in sculpture from Edinburgh College of Art in 2011. He works predominantly in video and sculpture with Laing himself, present in it. In his work Calvin is represented as the protagonist, playing an exaggerated and extended, alter-ego version of himself. He carries out performances in the public realm and the interaction with the public, often happening off camera, is an important part of the process, allowing the work to be manipulated and driven by people’s interjections.
23 June 2010 at 6pm
This month we will be revisiting the Collective Gallery to view Patchwork Cinema, a new body of work by Torsten Lauschmann which deconstructs the experience of time and cinema through the projected image.
As an artist, filmmaker and live performer, Lauschmann celebrates glitches and out-takes, bits in between and images that might be easy to ignore. Born in Germany and based in Glasgow, Lauschmann’s work has evolved beyond straight photography and film works to investigate the mechanics of digital processes, software creation, experimental editing, approaches to performance and the sculptural potential of video installation.
In Patchwork Cinema, Compilation 1, Lauschmann questions the formalised cinema experience and highlights the pivotal point in early cinema when film presentation was not prescribed in the same way. This work is an alternative cinema experience with an assemblage of found film footage with the addition of sound and lighting effects which have been programmed to trigger a further reimagining of how we view film.
Prior to entering Patchwork Cinema, visitors can view Digital Clock (Growing Zeros) 2010 consisting of a looped 24-hour projection of a digital clock with the red numerals changed manually by visible hands. This less formal digital time matches correct time local time. We will also be able to see Lauschmanns experiment with pre-cinema optics which transforms one of Collectives gallery spaces into a camera obscura.
25 February 2010 at 6pm
This month, we will explore the Collective Gallerys latest exhibition Documentalist – an international group show presenting work that explores blurred boundaries between fiction and reality through drawing, sculpture and film.
Chris Evans deliberately muddles the roles of artist and patron, genius and muse. Evans will show two sculptural pieces Warm Hermaphrodite and Repeat Horizon, both of which form visual motifs created by Evans in response to interviews with four elderly Italian politicians. All were asked about sacrifice and after a life in the public eye, on the choices they made.
Deimantas Narkevicius will show his film Revisiting Solaris. Trained as a sculptor, Narkevicius has developed a practice, based on video and film that explores fascinating, problematic and overlooked passages of recent post-communist European history, including his personal history of living and working in Lithuania during the soviet era and after.
Suzanne Treister’s practice deals with notions of identity, history, power and the hallucinatory. She will present Alchemy, a series of works which transcribe front pages of international daily newspapers into alchemical drawings, reframing the world as a place animated by strange forces, powers and belief systems.
Joining us to explore individual works and to discuss each artist’s relationship to the title Documentalist will be Kate Gray, Director of The Collective Gallery.
22 January 2005 at 6pm
Spin members were invited to an exclusive tour organised by Spin, the Contemporary Art Society and their associates, Blood, to address the wider context of collecting for institutions. The tour coincided with the Contemporary Art Society’s ShowCASe exhibition featuring over 100 works which have been acquired on behalf of the CAS in the last five years, ready for donation to galleries and museums across the country. On show at the City Art Centre and the Talbot Rice, this was the only complete showing of this group of works before it was dispersed to new homes throughout the UK.
FIELDTRIP! included a tour of the contemporary art collection in the new Scottish Parliament, in the company of two parliamentarians involved in commissioning work, Eric Kinsey and Dr John Gibbon, and art critic Moira Jeffrey, whose documentary about the process was aired on television recently. This was followed by a visit to ShowCASe with CAS curator Ceri Lewis and then attendance at the ‘ShowCASing Craft’ talk with Amanda Game, craft curator at the Scottish Gallery.
Finally, there was an exclusive screening of the National Galleries of Scotland’s first video commission, a work by Daniel Warren. Part two of the tour introduced some of Edinburgh’s cutting-edge spaces, together with curators and artists that drive the contemporary art scene in Edinburgh. These included Inverleith House, Ingleby Gallery, Collective Gallery and the Embassy Gallery.
26 June 2003 at 6pm
For this month’s gathering you are invited to meet at 6pm in the Collective Gallery on Cockburn Street, where our guest-host Andrew Patrizio will introduce the current exhibition of drawings and paintings by London-based artist Jessica Voorsanger.
The Collective is an interesting example of a non-profit, contemporary artists’ agency and gallery. It initiates and collaborates on exhibitions and projects in Edinburgh and internationally. The Collective Gallery represents emergent Scottish-based artists, supporting their work and the work of other artists, within the context of an international programme.
