PHOTOGRAPHY DENIS DORAN - COMMON GROUND Street Level, Glasgow, until Sat 11 Jun 000
A lone weed faces the Viewer or, rather. turns away so that its profile can be admired: everything you look at looks away. like NarCiSSus solicmng the gaze. Brighton-based Denis Doran's photographs of ‘Weeds' at the Street Level gallery force the Viewer to consider the seemingly unstoppable urge to protect sentiment onto specm‘ens smgled Out from nature's cl0ying bounty. So. some seem sweet and fragile. others struggle or seem pathetically heroic. As paeans to DOSl-meaHIICISU‘. these memento mori mimic the need to personify nature. Out from the blackness of the Viewers retina. the weed. like an irritant in the visual field. presents itself. emerging from a dark
VOid that threatens to engulf it and you.
In gallery 2 Doran digests the late modernist urge in photography to expose the mechanisms of the medium. The weeds in gallery 1 were encased in black boxes. so the scanner that was used w0uld throw light onto the flowers before falling into absolute nothingness: here the scanner has been placed flat on the ground of the photographer's allotment. These large. rich. banner-like photographs register Doran's presence. looking down to his ground and then outwards to the hazy beyond. The images want to be read as landscapes. and again ask the viewer to place her himself in impossible and fleeting positions. where your presence passes like a light footstep
or a trace on a torn Polaroid. (Alexander Kennedy)
MIXED SHOW
COOL HUNTING:
THE ORIGIN OF IDEAS Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat 28 May-Sat 9 Jul
Coo/hunter. (noun) A person who investigates cutting edge trends. fashions and ideas and sells them as market research to companies so they can incorporate them into their latest products.
The term, it is thought, first came into common usage in the New Yorker, in a 1995 article ‘The Coolhunt’ by Malcolm Gladwell. It noted: ‘The better coolhunters become at bringing the mainstream close to the cutting edge, the more elusive the cutting edge becomes.’ In the ever-decreasing gap between cutting edge and mainstream, where the catwalk transfers onto Topshop rails within weeks, the chase for cool becomes more frantic and far-reaching. Agencies such as WGSN - the Worth Global Style Network (www.wgsn.com) - track trends across the globe, picking up on everything from the way kids are dressing on the streets of $530 Paolo and basketball courts of New York to the art going on the walls in Berlin. Those hooked into the ‘scenes’, the ‘opinion leaders’ - whether they be a 16-year-old in Brooklyn or a
Sweet Double 2 by Christine Frew
thirtysomething fashion designer in London - are essential for multi-nationals peddling cool.
For Pat Fisher, curator at Talbot Rice Gallery, this dynamic has become the core to an exhibition of six artists, hunted both locally and from further afield. ‘Have you ever wondered why a new colour becomes the only colour you can wear that season?’ she says. ‘There’s a constant drive for newness and interest to explore how that is driven.’ Acknowledging that this is not just a recent phenomenon, she stresses that it has been ‘accelerated and intensified’ and points to the relationship between Gary Hume and Stella McCartney for the interrelation that art and fashion can operate in.
‘I had a meeting with the artists a year ago - some feel it’s a perfect fit to their work and others have taken the subtitle [‘The Origin of ldeas’] as their basis,’ she says. The seven artists include Angus Hood, Ross Flemington, Lyndsay Mann and Christine Frew from Edinburgh, Leeds-based Kerry Harker and Victor Kastelic who lives and works in Italy. Nearly all the work will be paintings or drawings and you can expect to see it incorporated into a wedge-espadrille in Office by the end of June. (Ruth Hedges)
PAINTING
VICTORIA MORTON
The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Sat 29 May 0...
Victoria Morton has been busy. Her OLJIpOuring of new work not only overwhelms the Modern institute gallery — it takes over an adjacent room too. This is apt as much of the work here is itself ()VOT‘.i‘/IIC‘IITIIITQ. ‘Mountain Conversation' (pictured) is thick With over-painting: a volatile thing. giving the iinpresSion that Morton might. at any moment. push the Viewer aside and start working away at its Surface with her brush.
Most of her new work has been made in Italy. and this show reads as a conversation with a landscape. perhaps even a love letter to it. Morton's abstract expreSSionism only occaSionally drifts toward the figurative. but terracotta and blue tints are strong hints. and there is enough in the way of line to build the impreSSion that an attempt is being made to transport the Viewer to warmer climes. There are digressions too. A quiet corner is reserved for a Cut-Out photograph of a dismembered melodica. and across the way hangs Captain Beefheart's 'Right Eye'. a portrait of Don Van Vliet that nods to his second career as a painter.
Next door. landscape returns. With small studies suggesting that Morton's colour bursts have considered. controlled origins. though even here paint slips off canvases onto frames. and four sguare boards run happily. inexorably, from dull brown to bright splashes of red and yellow. This is a loose. fluid show then. and one that sees Morton. who in the past has perhaps been guilty of wearing her influences on her sleeve. just painting. with confidence. lJack Mottrainl
.‘i% Max. 2" .J..'i .K‘t‘i‘ THE LIST 101