30 March 2023
In March we will be joining Stills Director, Ben Harman as he introduces us to their new exhibition, Johny Pitts: Home is Not a Place.
In 2021, photographer and writer, Johny Pitts, and poet Roger Robinson circumnavigated the British Coast in search of an answer. The resulting project, Home is Not a Place, presented as an exhibition supported by Photoworks, and book published by Harper Collins, reflects on Black British culture, people and geographies, exploring the notion of home.
‘My photographic practice involves trying to celebrate Black spaces, capture them while they’re still here and give them a home. If not in a literal sense in a figurative sense, for me home is somewhere that you take with you.’ – Johny Pitts
A self-taught photographer, working in the tradition of British documentary photography, Pitts was supported by the inaugural Ampersand/Photoworks Fellowship working closely with the Photoworks team for twelve months to allow him to develop this new series.
Home is Not a Place is currently on display at Graves Gallery in Sheffield, before coming to Stills in March 2023.
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.
24 April 2014
Our April Spin event will be a discussion of the group photography exhibition A Thousand of Him, Scattered: Relative Newcomers In Diaspora at Stills Gallery. We will be joined by gallery staff to discuss the works in the exhibition and themes of migration raised by it.
Including the work of seven international artists, A Thousand of Him, Scattered considers how individuals relate to their diasporic status and its daily realities through storytelling and biography. The exhibition is a reflection on the history of diaspora as a concept, and the simultaneous utility and redundancy of it as a term describing a shared experience away from the homeland. The curators urge us to (re)think and define ideas of belonging and citizenship in the present and for the future. The exhibition has been curated for Stills by Mother Tongue [Tiffany Boyle & Jessica Carden]. www.mothertongue.se
There will be a publication to accompany the exhibition including contributions from John Akomfrah, Sezgin Boynik, David Dibosa, Richard Fung, Lubaina Himid and Cinthya Lana and featuring the poetry of the Scottish-Ghanaian artist and poet Maud Sulter.
31 January 2013 at 6pm
For our first visit of 2013, we will be exploring ECONOMY at Stills with the exhibition’s curator, Kirsten Lloyd, who will join us in discussing the ideas behind the exhibition.
Primarily an exhibition of photography and film, ECONOMY includes work by artists such as Jeremy Deller, Tracey Emin, Melanie Gilligan, Claire Fontaine and Martha Rosler. The curators have also commissioned polemic texts by local and international writers, activists, journalists and artists to accompany the exhibition, and in turn, they respond to the key themes of migration, labour, sexuality, the crisis of democracy, the quest for alternative futures, the promise of Scottish independence in the context of a competitive global economy and the demise of the Empire of Europe.
ECONOMY is conceived as an exhibition and public forum comprising a website and a series of talks and events to generate constructive public discussion on how the economy impacts upon our lives. It is also presented across two venues, Stills Gallery in Edinburgh and the CCA in Glasgow.
29 February 2008 at 6pm
Peter Hujar is an important American photographer of the 1970s and early 1980s, whose work describes New York at a time when the city was financially impoverished but artistically rich.
Hujar started his career on the fringes of fashion photography and is best known for his black and white portraits of the New York avant-garde. He photographed his friends and members of his extended community in NYC, ranging from Andy Warhol and Susan Sontag to downtown artists and drag performers. Hujar’s subjects also include nudes, animals and the night time streets of Downtown Manhattan. Hujar’s work received little recognition during his lifetime, but he was an important influence on artists such as Nan Goldin and Robert Mapplethorpe, among others.
Joining us will be Kirsten Lloyd, Artistic Programmer of Stills, who will help us gain insight into who Peter Hujar was and what he saw through the lens of his camera. She will also show us round the new facilities at the Gallery.
26 October 2006 at 6pm
This month, you are invited to join us at Stills Gallery to view the work of Tracey Moffatt.
We will be joined by Kirsten Lloyd, Stills Programme Manager, who is also a practisng artist and a member of the artists group, Emerged. Kirsten will first introduce us to the most recent developments at the Gallery, and then we will discuss its current exhibition, Adventures by Tracey Moffatt.
Tracey Moffatt is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists and is highly regarded for her formal and stylistic experimentation in film, photography and video. She often describes herself as a director of photo-narratives, creating distinctive photographs which reference popular and visual art culture – an amalgamation of 70s television, comic books, B-movies and 007.
Shown alongside these photographic works is a group of her earlier films including Love (2003), a spectacular cut-and-paste video work which carefully splices together scenes from some of the artist’s favourite Hollywood melodramas. Cinematic cliche gives way to a darkly sexy feminism with hours of film edited down to a succession of passionate embraces, acts of betrayal, frenzied violence and revenge.
This should all make for a very interesting and entertaining event. We look forward to seeing you there.
29 October 2004 at 6pm
We have wanted to visit Stills Gallery for some time, and this exhibition – the culmination of a series of 18-month artists’ residencies – is the perfect opportunity to do so. Director of Stills, Deirdre MacKenna, will give us a tour of the facilities (Stills is much more than a gallery) and fill us in on the significant opportunities offered by their residency programme.
We will hear from Chris Dooks about his filmmaking career, art practice and interest in Buddhism. Chris is actually a dedicated and serious Buddhist, but he has an irreverent approach to the practice and a gift for entertaining speaking that makes the whole thing particularly accessible. His work is absorbing, amusing and deeply humane. So, in a rather unexpected continuation of a Spin theme – following Luke Watson’s photos last month of Kagyu Samye Ling, the Tibetan Buddhist Retreat near Lockerbie – we will see the beautiful and strange film that Chris made in its grounds. He is also showing a second work in installation form. The Seventeen Perfections of the CD Burner is a ‘Lost Buddhist Scripture of Scotland’ channelled to the artist in a Glen Lyon B&B. As Chris will explain, ‘this scripture conforms to the rules known to every teenage boy i.e. the rules for making the perfect compilation tape . . .’
Incidentally, one of Chris’s previous films, Demixed, made in the Northern Region Film and Television Archive, can be seen at http://www.isisarts.org.uk/dooks.html
In this, the first of two residents’ exhibitions to be shown at Stills, we will also see the work of four other artists, some of whom Spin members might remember from previous outings. The little gem of an exhibition by a group of retired people at Newhailes House this summer was organised by NGS Education and facilitated by Nicky Bird and Sam Hill. Here, you will see Nicky’s collection of vintage photos bought on EBay, Questions for Seller and Sam’s sweet (and sometimes explicit!) interactive animation addressing children’s questions about sex and reproduction. Spin-Off London has just come from seeing, at Pilot, Sam Clark‘s wine glasses, jumping and vibrating to piano chords. Here she shows Lure, an array of glasses that magnify mysterious objects trapped behind them. Along with Jessie Blindell‘s dramatic new photographic tableaux of melodramatic family scenarios, these works are all engaging, thoughtful, emotive and witty, and sit together remarkably well.
