SITE-SPECIFIC ART
ART IN THE HOME Various residential homes, Edinburgh, Thu 21-Sun 24 & Fri 29-Sun 31 Mar
Go on, admit it: most of us love to snoop around someone else’s home. Whether it’s from the comfort of our armchair watching Through The Keyhole, reading about a celebrity couple’s abode in Hello magazine or, less glamorously, when we’re house hunting, we’d rather see closed doors open.
Art In The Home is a unique project that allows public access to domestic residences. In a collaboration between Edinburgh College of Art, the City Art Centre, Collective Gallery and Yamaguchi Institute of Contemporary Art, artists from Scotland, Europe and Japan will create artworks for, and housed in, Edinburgh households. Following on from the success of work carried out in homes in Japan last October, the artists, which include Janice McNab, Paul Carter, Kate Gray, Ola Pehrson, Candy Factory, Yoshiyuki Shirakawa and Eiji Watanabe, will be seeing what challenges Edinburgh poses.
‘It is partly to do with curiosity about going into someone else’s house, but it’s also to do with
GROUP SHOW BODIES OF SUBSTANCE
Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until Thu 28 Mar
seeing the work in a house,’ says Jane Warrilow, exhibition organiser at the City Art Centre. ‘Some of the home owners will be there and they will become involved in the project, but we will have invigilators in the spaces. It’s like a very intimate, informal encounter with contemporary art in a domestic space!
As in Japan, the homes will be different as possible. In Yamaguchi, traditional Japanese houses and a modernist glass cube were used. In Edinburgh, there will be tenements, a Georgian flat, 3 Royal Terrace mews, a flat in Dumbiedykes and a colonies flat in Stockbridge.
‘We want people to walk around the city,’ says Warrilow. ‘So as well as going and visiting the houses
MIXFD MFDIA
House On Fire, Universal Studios by Janice McNab
and actually seeing the work, it would also be about getting to know the city and thinking about what’s happening architecturally.’ Art In The Homes provides new ways of working for the artists, while looking at the cultural differences between the two countries. A domestic environment in Japan is completely different to a domestic environment in Scotland. ‘The project explores issues between east and west and the different ways in which people use the spaces,’ Warrilow says. ‘But it’s also about that kind of public/private curiosity factor as well.’ (Helen Monaghan) I For more information about the pro/ect call 0731 529 39:38 or WWW. eca. ac. uk
KEITH FARQUHAR
The prefabrication of the female is the central theme of the work of Azade KOker. Margaret Hunter and Ping Oiu. They are three artists seeking to represent the ViSual motifs of the
seeial myth that is woman.
By using washing up gloves. breasts. fitted dresses and high heels — for better or worse the Signifiers of femininity — they attempt to show that the identity of women is a narrow
sooal construct.
Margaret Hunter's sCLilptures are a mixture of wood and metal. roughly hewn together. They stand like totems of femininity identifiable in their shape. but not eaSily identified with. Far better are her large pastel draWings that resemble a designer's blueprint for the female model. By using the female shape in a raw. primitive state. she leaves it to the Viewer to adorn the figures with their own cultural and social
expectations.
Ping Qiu delves into her own culture to use the shape of traditional Chinese cooking dishes as the baSis of her erotic. hermz.ipl'iroditic sCqutures. Pink and plump like little pigs With nipple trotters. they do not represent the ideal of beauty but Oiu's own. She also turns rubber gloves into beautiful lotus
doggerfisher, Edinburgh, until Sat 30 Mar 000
Untitled by Keith Farquhar
Farquhar. a name steeped in the pretension of plus-fours and waxed moustaches. Keith Farquhar is taking the piss. there is no doubt abom that. He has done it many times before with his grubby. unfinished exhibits that deliberately create a disappointing gulf between the ambition of the title
flowers. removing them from their association With drudgery.
Azade KOker's work is like stumbling into a ghost's wardrobe or some macabre bridal shop. Large PVC dresses hang from the ceiling shifting ll‘- the occaSional bree/e.
This is a very interesting exhibition in which the three artists cleverly use the female form to evoke our own prejudices and feelings on the female experience Without dictating. llsabella Weiri
races by Azade Koker
With the sixth form sensibility of the art object itself. It is a cunning trick that plays with traditional ideas of the avant- garde and the de. constructivist schools of thought. but the ioke is beginning to wear thin and he certainly stretches the point in his new show.
This is Farguhar's first exhibition in Edinburgh for oight years and is made up of mostly new work. He returns in a tartan fluriy ripping up Pringle sweaters. Argyll prints and Harris Tweeds in stunning pieces of identity subversion such as Temp/e Event and Bal/gown, Firework Motif.
His digital print Charisma Poem is charmless in a very adolescent. gothic way. but his clothes rail of shambolic delights is pretty cool. including some lovely babywear made from menswear remnants and the Charisma Police Blue. a military shirt with three rocks of cannabis resin on one epaulette. Wool and sweatshirt pieces collaborated With his mum and lowbrow firework paintings rendered over found paintings and canvases best illustrate the true enigma of Farguhar's work: is this amateur hour or grossly perverted concei)tualism’? Fascinating stuff nonetheless. (Paul Dalei
Art
PHOTOGRAPHY SUSANNE RAMSENTHALER TIMELINES & HISTORY
Street Level, Glasgow, until Sat 30 Mar
0..
Time/mes. the first part of Susanne Ramsenthaler's exhibition. considers photographic process in relation to subject matter. exploring the way we see things. It's difficult to consider these pairs of image and text works Without thinking of similar image text ‘travelogues' by Richard Long or Robert Smithson. The text. meticulously typeset. conveys snatches of information — time. date. place. a condensed description — alongSide blurred images of a US landscape. Ramsenthaler's images could be read as a metaphor for the American road trip. where places are remembered as a compressed blur of impressions. rather than a series of sharp-focus stills.
ill 2 (ll: \lf/WW WW xi»)
Amnesia
In History. she takes an archaeological approach through classification. recording and documenting. Monochrome images of hand-forged nails create an unrecogi‘isable. but very graphic. language akin to X-rays or hit-Broglyphics. and the nails are simultanmusly elevated from lost and forgotten functional ODJCCTS to the status of precious relic.
Soap. depicted iii greathy enlarged colour photographs and arranged as a frie/e around the gallery \.'.t'a.'ls. is similarly removed from the immediate associations we bring to the e\.'er\,(‘lay. ’lhese fragments £1(I(]Lill'(} a gem- ;ike quality in then emerald and amber translucency evoking memories of artefacts from the domestic past and the forgotten leftovers of our own personal history iSusannah l'hoinpsoiti
‘i.1 Q’tt Mai .‘t‘i‘;’ THE LIST 91