31 October 2024
pass shadow, whisper shade brings together new work by the six participants in the 2024 Satellites Programme: Clarinda Tse, Emelia Kerr Beale, Hannan Jones, Josie KO, Katherine Fay Allan and Rowan Markson.
The title borrows from an Irish proverb, ‘Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoine’, roughly translating as ‘people live in each other’s shadows’, or, ‘we rely on each other for shelter.’ Both a shade and a shadow, this kind of shelter encompasses the positive and negative aspects of being part of a community, living in the shadow of each other and our ancestors.
Across a range of distinctive and individual practices and media, the works signal something of the complexity of inheritance, raising questions of how we process and make sense of that which we inherit, the expansive multiplicity of legacies passed down by and through earlier generations.
24 February 2022
We’re back! Finally for in-person visits to galleries in Edinburgh. This month, we are heading along to the Talbot Rice Gallery for their current exhibition In the Round, where we will be joined by curator James Clegg. This visit will hopefully mark the return of physical visits for 2022.
In the Round is the first major exhibition in the UK of Angelica Mesiti, one of the leading Australian artists of her generation. Building upon her practice, it takes a dynamic journey that extends through historical painting, ancient musical notation, geological specimens and musical instruments. Mesiti consistently returns to communication and translation in her sound, performance and video installations, reflecting the struggle of communities to co-exist. Taking this unique opportunity to combine present concerns with historical research, Mesiti allows her artworks to echo through ancient objects and to materialise in new works made for this expansive exhibition.
25 January 2018
For our first event for 2018, we will be exploring NOW – the second in a series of exhibitions which highlight the range of quality of work being made by artists associated with Scotland and across the globe.
The centrepiece of NOW is new and recent sound installations, paintings and photographs by the Turner Prize-winning artist, Susan Philipsz. Born in Glasgow in 1965 and now based in Berlin, she is renowned for her installations and how sound can trigger memory and heighten perception.
Seven Tears (2016) features seven synchronized record players each playing a single note taken from the baroque lament, Lachrimae or Seaven Teares Figured in Seaven Passionate Pavans (1604) by the English composer, John Dowland (1563-1626). The original composition was written for viol and lute and is based on the motif of a falling tear. Philipsz has isolated individual tones from the original song, making it less recognisable. Each note was produced by running a wet finger around the rim of glasses filled with water. These recordings have then been rendered onto transparent vinyl records.
To complement Seven Tears, Philipsz has made a series of salt paintings, produced by submerging painted canvases into a bath of salted water.
Other featured artists include paintings by Michael Armitage, a newly commissioned installation by Sarah Rose, photographs by Yto Barrada, video installation by Hiwa K and a display pairing 19th-century dolls with drawings by Kate Davis.
A key thread woven through the exhibition is storytelling and ideas around collecting, play, legacy, memory and loss.
26 September 2013, 6-7.30pm
Welcome back after the summer break. Our September Spin event will be hosted by the Talbot Rice Gallery where we will be discussing the summer’s very successful Edinburgh International Festival exhibition, Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds. Those who came along for the Edinburgh Art Festival Art Late in August had a brief preview of this exceptional exhibition. We will be joined for the discussion by Talbot Rice Gallery Curator James Clegg who will join us to discuss the first survey exhibition of Paik’s work in Scotland.
No other artist has had greater influence on the use of technology in art than Nam June Paik; he prophesied changes that would shape the contemporary world, exemplified in his pioneering ideas, ‘Participation TV’, ‘Random Access Information’ and ‘Video Commune’.
Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds celebrates the 50th anniversary of Paik’s first solo exhibition, Exposition of Music – Electronic Television (Wuppertal 1963), when the artist brought television into the realm of art for the first time, presenting it as a tactile and multisensory medium. As part of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s, Paik believed that artists should humanize technology, get their ‘fingers in and tear away the walls’ of the establishment. Paik, a trained musician, treated technology as a material part of his repertoire, which later expanded to include video, satellite transmissions, robots and lasers.
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.
23 February 2012 at 6pm
This month we will be visiting The Fruitmarket Gallery to see and discuss the work of Plymouth-born artist Anna Barriball who makes work which moves between the parallel languages of drawing and sculpture.
Barriball often uses the practice of drawing to create something which might be more properly understood to be sculpture.Much of her practice explores and depicts the accretion of time – from the length of time it takes for a candle to burn down to the repetitious activity of taking graphite rubbings from objects that bare the traces of their use or function. Her interventions produce objects that combine a minimalistic rigour and the seemingly endless endeavour to make sense of the world of objects by empirical study.
This exhibition brings together work made over the last ten years, and encompasses drawing, sculpture and video. It includes the kind of works on paper for which Barriball first became known, and also major new commissions: a large windbreak sculpture and a wall drawing.
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.
19 May 2010 at 6.30pm
This month we visit the sumptuous and beautifully intimate cinema within GMAC to see the work of the highly acclaimed emerging artist, Corin Sworn, who will personally screen her short films, show slides and talk to us about her emerging practice.
Corin Sworn (born in London 1976, lives in Vancouver and Glasgow) is a visual artist whose work explores issues connected with the process by which subjective experience becomes translated into history. She works with drawing, video and sculpture, and her work has been shown in group exhibitions including: ICA London (2010), Witte de Wih (2010) EASTInternatinal (2009), Kunsthalle Basel (2009), The Contemporary Art Gallery, Bogotá, The Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Participant Inc. New York (2008). A new solo exhibition was presented at the Glasgow International Festival of Visual Arts, and she has a forthcoming solo show at Tramway.
Within her practice, Sworn draws on historical events to produce works that serve the place of artefacts, ephemera or props in a fragmented retelling of some historical, cultural event. These works are not interested in reproducing a specific history but in analyzing some suggestion within it. Throughout this work she has often considered whether mute objects can carry and convey the events they purport to relate to. Or whether they, instead, situate readings that are performed upon them.
For over 20 years, GMAC (Glasgow Media Access Centre) has supported independent filmmakers and the community through access to low cost facilities, equipment and high quality training and production opportunities. GMAC provides a central space and resource for all people interested in film and media. The organisation aims to be a bridge between local communities and the screen industries by providing opportunities and accessible resources for all. www.g-mac.co.uk
