Tag Archives: Kate Gray

New Work Scotland Programme: Conor Kelly and Calvin Laing

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.

 

Documentalist

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.