Visual Art
Review
INSTALLATION. PHOTOGRAPHY AND Fll M
ANDREW SUNLEY SMITH - MIGRATORY PROJECTS
CCA, Glasgow, until Sat 18 Nov 0000
Migratory Projects, by Australian artist Andrew Sunley Smith, loosely explores migration and survival, via records of journeys through Australia. Along with documentary photographs, items from the journeys are re-presented as artworks.
Sunley Smith has said, ‘The objects involved in the exhibition process have endured and experienced something very real and direct.’ This integration of everyday life and art is at the core of his practice. Carrier III in gallery one is a van transformed into a portable home, filled with sleeping bag, kettle, tins of food, etc. On the top is a portable garden, growing tomatoes and herbs. Road Trip Dinners, a series of photographs displayed on a TV monitor aims to extend the appreciation of Carrier Ill; artist and friend drive the van to catch and prepare a fish for dinner before cooking it over the van engine with vegetables and herbs from the portable garden.
These works do seem like travel documentary with
THE LIST 1‘.) Oct 2 Nov
little philosophical impact, yet Sunley Smith seems to quietly question the need for our excessive throwaway culture of consumption; perhaps we could all find more economical means of living like Sunley Smith’s van/garden. Microgestures, an ongoing series of digital prints pinned loosely to the wall continues the utopian feel, revealing equal divisions of labour among travellers. Images of anonymous hands hammering and cooking are displayed alongside idyllic landscapes, creating an altruistic alternative society.
In contrast with the woolly idealism of the opening works, The Drive Out Cinema is a powerful, haunting and moving video/installation. Projected onto a large, cinematic screen is footage of domestic items such as tables, chairs, and even a piano, being violently dragged along deserted, midnight roads by a rope tied to a moving vehicle, while unknown figures run towards us as if trying to catch up. Displayed around the screen are the many salvaged tragic and tortured remains of the objects. Sunley Smith’s running people recreate something of the unrest and dislocation in our constantly changing runaway culture and the salvaged objects, like Carrier III, reveal possibilities for multiple use or regeneration which lies within so much of what we carelessly misuse, destroy or discard. (Rosie Lesso)
INSTAI I ATION
ROBIN ARSENAULT - DINNAE UBU (off site), Glasgow, until Fri 20 Oct 000
PHOTOGRAPHY. VIDEO AND INSTALIATION
Sfiéfi“"c”u‘rh§%‘llé' Eggkr‘llt %J6‘r?s“&‘§un PETER MCCAUGHY Glasgow School of Art, Mackintosh Gallery, Glasgow, until Mon 30 Oct 0..
This slick little exhibition continues the annual ‘outing' of the talents of GSA staff members. The work on show touches on ideas of time. place and the way that humanity binds and registers these abstract notions through the awareness of our mortality. McCaughy's ‘Barr Work (Preludel' records the reunion of six family members returning to County Tyrone. Northern Ireland after sixty years of separation. The characters faces flicker with micro-emotions. through contentment to slight discomfort. thoughtfulness to confrontation. The figures appear to blink backwards, going back in time. as birds sing onwards in the eternal landscape behind them.
In Cooper's work. ‘Out of Africa'. the viewer stands where the photographer once stood. looking out towards the sublime edges of oceans. Each of the large gelatin silver prints forces the viewer to feel and react. to be pulled into the inky blacks. get caught in the grey nets of cross tides or stand in an illusion of security on crisp represeiitations of rocky outcrops. Borland's seductive installation comprises hundreds of Limoges porcelain pieces as the broken. weathered and fired fragments of a skeleton. Eye-ball socket pots and broken ribs like teacup handles are washed up on a glass shelf — the human debris of a hiin tide in the corner of the gallery space. (Alexander Kennedy)
As you enter the gloomy Dennistoun flat. the big band music of ‘Tap Your 'I‘i'oubles Away' from Mack and Mabel rings out. A small circle showwrg dancing legs and feet is projected on a screen, as though we are peeping through a hole. but slowly realise that these legs are not real. wooden in fact. and the tap dancing Mary- Janes are most definitely not in time to the music. They flop about in a rather random way. not keeping up with the song being belted out by Lisa Kirk. This (’lisjunction of inspiration and effect demonstrates Arseneault's concern wrth success and failure — do it well or just dinnae!
The rooms are dark because there are blinds at the wrndow. pricked with holes: ‘Tap, Tap. Tap'. leaving patterns of light on the floor and up in lights: a tiny Broadway theatre. The fairytale legs are condemned to dance on. Or is this a ritual dance so that Pinocchio can become a real boy? The wooden legs used in the video sit menacineg in the corner of another room; maybe they run around at night. taunting the unicycles With their pentagonal wheels. Both exhibition rooms are filled wrth these useless unicycles. black and menacing. from six feet hiin down to six inches. They are offset by the relentlessly jolly song, and the blinds depicting big fart cloudsr speech bubbles emitting between dancing legs like Aubrey Beardsley's Lysr’strata illustrations. But. be careful and dinnae trip on that rug. Who knows what might happen? (Ailsa Boyd)