Tag Archives: Summerhall

Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame

30 January 2020

The first Spin event of the year will see us heading to Summerhall for their group show Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame. In the exhibition, four major female artists investigate and uncover strange landscapes and the power of myth-making and folklore. The artists research, reclaim, reveal and represent semi-imagined old pasts, new futures, and truth.

In her film Daedalus, Victoria Clare Bernie explores conspiracy and myth surrounding Rudolf Hess’ failed flight, on 10 May 1941, to Dungavel House, the summer residence of the Duke of Hamilton in South Lanarkshire (now an immigration detention facility).

Madrid-based artist Maria Gimeno’s Queridas Viejas (Dear Old Mistresses), restores women artists to their rightful place in art history. Queridas Viejas is currently showing at the Prado Museum in Madrid.

In Hamsafar (Fellow Traveller), Mina Heydari-Waite investigates how Iranian cultural histories, traditions and experiences are relayed and how diaspora artists collect, reassemble and refabricate cultural cues and narratives to create new settings for themselves.

Alix Villanueva, a multi-media, Edinburgh-based artist and cosmoecologist, displays in her work a range of modern mythmaking, merging sculptural elements, image-making and rituals to explore and unpack relationships with other beings.

The exhibition includes drawings, film, sound, objects, installation and performance, across six gallery rooms. We’ll be joined by the exhibition’s curator Wendy Law and the artist Alix Villanueva.

 

Not Man The Less, But Nature More | Modern Edinburgh Film School | David Faithfull | Henry Coombes

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.

Science Festival Exhibitions including Bigert & Bergström, Jessica Lloyd-Jones and Silas Parry

22 May 2014

Our May Spin event will be a tour and discussion of some of the Science Festival exhibitions at Summerhall. We will be joined by artist Silas Parry to discuss the various installations and themes raised by science and art collaborations.

Swedish artist duo Bigert & Bergström are obsessed with the climate and its extremes. The weather – both a trivial theme for petty conversation and a life threatening natural force – is central in their art. Together with the Canadian storm chaser and meteorologist Mark Robinson, Bigert & Bergström travelled to the Midwest in the US, to film and document the increasingly hostile weather patterns that are developing today. The Weather War centres on B&B’s attempt to intercept a tornado using a device called the Tornado Diverter.

 Jessica Lloyd-Jones’ Hidden Energies explores diverse interests in the theme of energy, including such subjects as particle physics, biological electricity and Kirlian imaging, through a range of sculptural media and moving image techniques that demonstrate a distinct fascination with natural phenomena.

Silas Parry is a Scottish artist and Possibility of Life is his first UK solo exhibition. These kinetic robotic taxidermy sound-sculptures invest forgotten and lifeless relics with a new identity.

The Beautiful Book and Flickering Lights: Rachel McLean and Ryan Gander

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.