30 April 2015
For our April Spin event we will be visiting artist-run Embassy gallery to discuss MUD, an exhibition of new work and stealth collaborations by Mel Franklin Smith and Alex Pollard and works by Mike Cooter.
We will be joined by the exhibition’s curator Dane Sutherland and other committee members. Shoes and other artworks are displayed on top of horizontal screens giving the overall effect of light emitting sarcophagi.
Pollard and Franklin Smith are ‘collaborating’ with a diverse list of artists, inanimate objects and concepts including the German Democratic Republic, Physarum Polycephalum (the many-headed slime), computer animation artist Clifford Sage and Jeff Koons’ contemporary, Meyer Vaisman. Previously a Franklin Smith and Pollard collaborative project involved wirelessly hacking visitors’ iOS 8 devices. The exhibition runs until Sunday 3rd May.
28 January 2005
This month, we will be visiting the exhibition, Frankie and Other Stories at the Embassy Gallery.
Glasgow artist Ronnie Heeps is not easy to describe or pin down. He is a horror/dream/fairy storyteller for the electronic age. His paintings are psychedelic and psychological, surreal and satirical. The ‘airbrush’ style and palette of some of Ronnie’s paintings might suggest a naive mysticism, but wisdom and complexity rise to the surface the longer you look.
Indeed you may have seen two of his beautiful (and spooky) Ghost Paintings at the Collective Gallery (one in the Haunted Swing exhibition and one in the Birthday Party) – the forms of Margaret Thatcher and Lady Agnew gradually appear in what one initially takes to be a white monochrome. The Frankie of the exhibition title is Ronnie’s name for Frankenstein’s monster. In his first solo show for three years, Ronnie focuses on the isolation and frustration of a person/monster who can find no place in the society that created him.
Also joining us to ask Ronnie questions, will be Dr Neil Mulholland, who is Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Edinburgh College of Art, a busy curator and a prolific writer. Our hosts are Jenny Hogarth and the other directors who established the Embassy Gallery last year.
Individually, they are all talented young artists and as a group they deliver the professional development programme for students (and public) at ECA. They have already organised three performance and video evenings as well as touring group shows to Glasgow and Manchester. This is the first time, since the Collective opened 20 years ago, that artists have set up such an ambitious venture in Edinburgh (they intend that Embassy, like the Collective, will continue and develop beyond their own tenure). Their potential has been recognised with funding from Scottish Arts Council, ECA Trustees and the young Scot award. Everyone is enjoying following their progress.
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.
