Visual Art
Qev I ews
PHOTOGRAPHY AND SCULPTURE
BECKY BEASLEY
UBU Gallery Offsite, Glasgow, until Wed 5 Jul .000
The word liminal is, perhaps, overused on pages such as these, but it’s the word that springs to mind when wandering through Becky Beasley's photographs and sculptures. There are two rooms full of Beasley's work, the door into one labelled ‘Entrance', the other ‘Exit’. This playful notification speaks of the deliberate uncertainty at the heart of Beasley's work: whenever her practice leads her into a room - one marked Photography. the other Sculpture - she seems distinctly unwilling to cross the threshold.
Beasley‘s photographs are unconventionally framed, or screwed to the wall, and are photographs about photography, printed so as to emphasise the making of a print, in a way that verges on the sculptural. Her photographs of sculptures are also shown here: twin boxes on unsteady plinths, close to being designed, crafted, useful objects. But, lest anyone think Beasley has walked through the door of that room marked Sculpture, the boxes are woody realisations of a literary reference, their dimensions drawn from a Faulkner novella. Then there is ‘Stumbling Block’, two piles of prints on the floor, awkwardly guarding the entrance to a small room, they are as solid as stone, eroding away to nothing as each visitor takes a sheet home.
This is not navel-gazing, nor dry meta-art, though. The work here is beautiful, but Beasley passes a happy discomfort with her chosen media on to the viewer. It’s as if we are watching her working, not looking at her work. (Jack Mottram)
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we are driven by the desire for pleasure
PAINTING CHAD MCCAIL Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, until Mon 25 Sep 0000
To successfully meld a medium with its subject matter is more difficult than it sounds. Chad McCall's exhibition at GoMA is a lesson iii how this can be achieved. McCail uses the chalky flatness of gouache to play off the dry two—dimensional illustration of hypocritical bourgeois morality pointed up by his paintings. The invisible, ideological structures that uphold our impossible lives are exposed in McCail‘s work; he creates a '1984' version of reality where dOublespeak reigns and truth is IOund in lies.
We are presented With a series of modern morality tales. exquisitely detailed double spread manuals that tell us how to. Or rather, reflect how we actually do live our lives. ‘We are driven by the desire for pleaSure’. is the cod Freud message from one pithy poster. The erotic drive in Freud’s ‘Civilisation and its Discontents' quickly becomes mortally threatening. with art as a pretty diversion that temporarily binds the wounds of war and stops us fucking each other to death. The world becomes a classroom, where the lessons of sex are taught. Men are ‘bad'; they wear crosses on their chests and their penises are drawn to resemble daggers. women are ‘good'. wear ticks on their t-shirts and have hearts where vaginas should be. It would be hilarious if it didn't ring horribly true.
Elsewhere. global capitalism gets the same treatment. In ‘We are uncompetitive. money is handed back and forth. as plastic roses 'grow' in the background and piles of rifles gather to the fore. (Alexander Kennedy)
92 THE LIST 8—22 Jun 2006
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Installation shot 1 .r
PAINTING AND DRAWING GRAHAM FLACK AND PATTI YUILL Amber Roome, Edinburgh, until Thu 22 June 00
Disembodied. enlarged heads are usually a curious phenomenon in art, perhaps because we so rarely encounter them in daily life. Here we have two artists exploring them. albeit to different ends. Patti Yuill's Oil paintings question the memory's ability to recall unremarkable faces from everyday encounters. Her attempts to convey this idea involve partially obscured painted faces. ‘KeVin' greets viewers to the show With an expreSSionIess. oversized face hiding behind random white rectangles. thereby ressembling a half-finished puzzle. This leaves Viewers to fill in the missing pieces. Michael. also partly concealed. has a more enigmatic face. Have I met him somewhere? The ordinary names: 'Kevm', 'Michael', ‘Johnny', etc. imply this possibility. Yet, attempts to materialise memories are overshadowed by the formalism of the technique — geometric rectangles are too obvious to convey the subtlety of the theme.
Graham Flack‘s drawings delve deeper than Yuill‘s, hovering more successfully between the 'factual and imaginary. giant heads seeming to have emerged from nightmare yiSions rather than ordinary encounters. Names like ‘Moses'. ‘Raphael' and ‘Jerome‘ recall history and mythology. ‘Ariel'. a profile image in charcoal is more than five times the Size of the average human head and looms large like a giant Scottish rock. Other. slightly smaller drawmgs. like Pedro. show eyes, nose and mouth filling out to the edges of the paper. The subtle differences between the features of each man are visually stimulating when flicking from face to face. yet technical profiCIency overshadows substance; one can't help feeling their repetition is more of a vain display of draughtsmanship than an attempt to convey real psychological content. IROSie Lesso‘i
Johnny by Patti Yuill