28 September 2017
For our autumn programme, we will be exploring the work of Glasgow-based artist Kate Davis, in this her first solo exhibition in Edinburgh. Nudes Never Wear Glasses brings together a new photographic series with drawings and two film works on the subject of women’s domestic labour. The title of exhibition refers to a comment made by the photographer Jo Spence.
The film work Weight (2014, 11mins) takes John Read’s 1961 BBC documentary about the artist Barbara Hepworth as its starting point. Replacing references to art with references to housework and childcare, this clever satire explores how televised depictions of creativity have constructed our understanding of artistic production and other forms of labour.
Also on show is the first gallery presentation of her Margaret Tait Award film, Charity (2017, 16mins). This is a witty, filmic essay on the subject to women breastfeeding told through a variety of art historical still imagery, interlaced with moving images of the artist undertaking household tasks and a narration recited by Gerda Stevenson of extracts adapted from the writings of Margaret Tait (1918-1999). Tait was an Orcadian filmmaker, poet, artist and writer whose film poems, hand-painted animations and documentaries were pioneering in the field of experimental filmmaking.
27 July 2017
For our summer Spin event before the August break, we will be heading up Calton Hill to visit Collective. Set up in 1984, Collective supports new work by artists who are at a pivotal stage in their development.
We will be discussing a new film and installation by Glasgow-based artist Ross Little with Siobhan Carroll, Head of Programme at Collective. The work considers different forms of globalized labour found in the ship breaking yards of India and on board a transatlantic cruise ship, contrasting the experiences of the employees and the passengers. The work is presented in an installation created to reflect the interior design of cruise ships.
We will also meet Lori Anderson, Head of Development, who will give us an insight into the redevelopment project of the A-listed City Observatory complex due to open in 2018. Collective are the custodians of this important piece in the nation’s heritage and will reopen with visual arts and learning spaces – the first time that the site will be open freely to the public in its history.
30 March 2017
This month we are heading to The Fruitmarket Gallery to explore and discuss the work of Mark Wallinger. This is a two-part exhibition, shown at the Fruitmarket and the DCA in Dundee.
Mark Wallinger has been making art and exhibiting since the 1980s. You may be familiar with his piece, Ecce Homo, a marble resin life-sized statue of Jesus Christ which became the first sculpture to be mounted on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square in 1999. His Turner Prize-winning installation of 2007, State Britain, was a painstaking recreation of Brian Haw’s anti-war peace camp in Parliament Square.
For his new exhibition, Wallinger presents his id Paintings (2015-16), a recent body of monumental paintings made entirely by the artist’s hands and black acrylic paint. Part-painting, part-performance, he used both hands simultaneously, the left mirroring the right. Also on show, will be his ‘I’ self-portrait paintings, continuing his on-going fascination with self-portraiture. In addition, there will be a selection of works from the last 10 or so years including the film Sleeper (2004).
25 June 2015
For our next Spin event on Thursday 25 June we will be visiting Summerhall’s early summer programme of exhibitions. Curator Holly Knox Yeoman will join us in our discussion, highlighting some exhibitions they currently have on show.
Modern Edinburgh Film School’s MOTHS exhibition features work by Zoë Fothergill, Anne McGuire, Lucy Skaer, Katrina Vallé, Amy Pickles, Mairi Lafferty, Anna Lucas, Allison Gibbs, Jenny Brady and Bobby Niven. It explores human interaction with animals, natural and synthetic substances.
Henry Coombes new film Two Discs and a Zed has two main sets: the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh and a mountainous landscape somewhere in the Highlands.
David Faithfull’s Leviathan exhibition features recent work made on the remote isle of Inch Kenneth off the western shores of Mull, surrounded by the relentless onslaught of the Atlantic Sea, lies.
Not Man The Less, But Nature More is a group exhibition of work by Cendrine Rovini, El Gato Chimney, Erika Nordqvist, Esther Pearl Watson, Fred Stonehouse, Rithika Merchant, Solange Knopf and Zeki Agacan. Uninfluenced by academic training, the artists in this exhibition reproduce the surroundings they inhabit and have an intimate relationship with nature.
27 February 2014, 6-7.30pm
Our February Spin event will be a discussion at the new Collective gallery spaces at the City Observatory on the historic Calton Hill;
We will be discussing the two exhibitions on show: Bertille Bak’s film Faire le mur and Catrin Jeans’ Recreationally Surviving The Great Outside installation. We will be joined by Collective Programme Manager, Siobhan Carroll to talk about these exhibitions, the move to the new site and their plans for the future.
Collective are pleased to present work by Bertille Bak for the second Factish Field exhibition. Bak is an artist based in Paris who works predominantly in film; her work draws on observations of the communities she works with. Her 2008 film Faire le mur presented here follows the inhabitants of an old mining village in Northern France through their last revolt against development and the subsequent raised rents. Factish Field is a year-long collaboration between Collective and London-based LUX looking at artist films and anthropology.
Catrin Jeans’ installation Recreationally Surviving – The Great Outside is the first exhibition in the 2014 Satellites programme (the re-named New Work Scotland). For this Jeans has created a playful installation of a staged wilderness in the gallery. Centered on a series of pursuits that were originally needed for surviving ‘in the great outdoors’; such as hiking, fishing and animal tracking, Jeans’ new work explores how ‘traditional’ skills have been adopted as leisure entertainment and weekend escapism.
25 April 2013, 6-7.30pm
For our April Spin event, we will be visiting Summerhall, the new arts venue in the former Royal Dick Vet School building at the edge of The Meadows. It is the first major new arts venue to have opened in Edinburgh for many years and houses several gallery spaces, performance spaces, artists’ studios and the Demarco Collection among numerous other activities. Curator Paul Robertson will join us in discussing two exhibitions: The Beautiful Book and Flickering Lights: Rachel McLean and Ryan Gander and the broader aims for the new venue.
The Beautiful Book is an exhibition of one artwork by filmmaker, photographer and gay icon Jack Smith. In 1962, Smith made one of the most famous of photographic art books – that book was called The Beautiful Book. It was the only autonomous collection of his photographs that appeared before his death in 1989.
Presented as part of the Flickering Lights programme at Summerhall, Lolcatz is a film by up-and-coming Edinburgh-trained artist Rachel Maclean. Her films are always garish and chaotic comprising mash-up pop culture, television hype and Scottish identity. Lolzcatz is an ornate mix of Egyptian cat worship, the Tower of Babel, a Starbucks-like trading symbol and internet memes.
Finally, we will look at Ryan Gander’s film work As It Presents Itself – Somewhere Vague. Made in claymation, it brings together characters based on Spike Milligan, curator Matthew Higgs, Mrs Frances Gander (the artist’s mother), the Lumière Brothers, Auguste and Louis. Written by Gander, the voiceover is provided by actor Richard Briers.
26 January 2012 at 6pm
The Sculpture Show is a major new exhibition which uses the extraordinary collection at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to explore the development of sculpture over the last 110 years.
We will start by exploring a striking late work by American Minimalist artist Sol LeWitt which has been specially installed for the exhibition and has never before been on display in Scotland. Wall Drawing #1136 (2004) covers three walls of a single room, and reaches almost 22 metres in length.
We will also be looking at the work of Glasgow-based sculptor, Nick Evans, who has had access to the national collections as part of a National Galleries/Creative Scotland Fellowship. Recently Evans has been interested in the scholarship and history of the encounter between cultures, what is often called exoticism, the way that artists like Gauguin came across Oceanic art or Picasso’s encounter with African art.
Other works to explore will be an enchanting film, The Way Things Go by Peter Fischli and David Weiss which documents a 100-foot causal chain assembled of everyday objects triggered by fire and pyrotechnics; Ron Mueck’s monumental work A Girl (2006); and Simon Starling’s Le Jardin Suspendu (1998), a scale model of a 1920s French Farman Mosquito plane built using the wood from a balsa tree cut in Ecuador.
21 September 2011 at 6.30pm
Peter McCaughey is an artist based in Glasgow, who works internationally with a practice focused on the local. He describes his practice as people-centred, ideas-based work. His research is currently focused on landscape and memory, ritual, exchange, and how art and the artist might operate in relation to people in the public realm. His work is often site-related and time-specific. Sometimes the work is transient, involving film, video, outdoor projection, sound and light and storytelling; on other occasions the work is permanent, using more traditional materials and processes to explore experiential and conceptual ideas.
Through his recent work, he has been testing the contested role of the artist in the process of regenerating place. He regularly collaborates with artists, architects, engineers, writers, and community activists. To do this as effectively as possible, he established Wave, a small organisation set up five years ago to support and direct a team approach to large urban regeneration arts projects, public art commissions and various levels of consultation.
Currently, Peter is beginning the second half of a one-year residency at the Glasgow Housing Association as their Creative Advisor. He has also started his first project as an art commissioner for the urban regeneration company, Clyde Gateway.
Peter hopes to use Trongate 103 as both a traditional studio for testing and developing ideas, and a meeting place to test some of the models he is currently trying to develop that aim to bridge the lack of opportunities for artists working in the city.
15 December 2010 at 6.30pm
Acclaimed emerging artist Shelly Nadashi will personally screen her short films, show slides and talk to us about her emerging practice.
Nadashi is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Glasgow, having graduated from The School for Visual Theatre in Jerusalem and from the MFA programme at the Glasgow School of Art. Her practice encompasses a variety of media such as performance, video, puppetry, text, sound and object-making.
Nadashi’s work is simultaneously autobiographical and surreal, presenting narratives that examine the way in which personal situations are constructed from broader social contexts. This strategy emotionally engages and entertains the audience whilst concurrently creating a space for them to reflect on the wider themes inherent in these narratives, such as voyeurism, social pressure to conform and the effect of our immediate environment on our mental state. A sophisticated comic exaggeration in both her speech and gesture accentuate the pathos of her situation but also contradicts the melodrama by undercutting the seriousness of whats at stake.
Nadashi has sustained interest in working with inanimate objects. This performative mechanism mimics the relationship between the puppet and puppeteer, setting up a symbolic, fetishistic (mystical and sexual) rapport with these objects and attributing to them particular powers. This technique allows a forensic examination of lifes intimate moments that is incisive but dreamlike. The objects exist as documents of a performance but are also imbued with a votive quality independent of the text.
Nadashi has exhibited and performed internationally, participated in numerous group exhibitions, and produced an award-winning film. She is currently working towards two solo exhibitions.
28 October 2010 at 6pm
Our Spin event will be split over the two modern art galleries to see the work of Turner prize winner Richard Wright who was commissioned by The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to make a major wall-painting in one of the public stairwells of the Dean Gallery; and Part 3 of the rehang What you see is where you’re at featuring the work of Luke Fowler.
Glasgow-based artist Richard Wright is best known for painting on walls, where the context and architecture of the space are the content of the work. Believing that ‘there’s already too much stuff in the world’ Wright describes his work as having similar qualities to a musical performance in that it exists in the memory of the creator and the audience, but can’t be owned, sold, or carried around.
The title of the rehang What you see is where you’re at comes from the film on display by award winning Glasgow-based artist Luke Fowler. Fowler’s film documents and explores the Kingsley Hall social experiment carried out in the 60s by the Scottish psychiatrist and writer R. D. Laing and is part of his ongoing investigation into radical thinkers and those responsible for the development of progressive ideas.
We look forward to you joining us in discussion to uncover how the Dean building’s architecture, history and present function have all informed Richard Wright’s work and how the medium of film has provided Luke Fowler with the unique ability to facilitate access to such a sensitive subject. This will also be a chance for us to see some of the new contemporary works on display as part of the re-hang including Robert Therrien and Gilbert and George.
