Visual Art
Review
ARCHITECTURE GILLESPIE, KIDD AND COIA: 1956-1987 The Lighthouse, Glasgow, Feb 0”.
It‘s always difficult to review an architecture exhibition. Do you focus on the realised buildings or the sketches, blueprints and models on show and the way they are presented? At first sight, this exhibition of the work of Scottish Modernist masters Gillespie, Kidd and Coia presents such a difficulty, but this is swiftly resolved due to the generally high quality of its constituent parts.
There are many highlights in the exhibition and in the firm’s career. St Bride's in East Kilbride, for instance, is a factory for worshipping God, topped with a version of a cathedral's clerestory (the glass-filled upper storey), that manages to be both brutal and elegant. Yet, among these successes lurk ugly leviathans such as Cumbernauld Technological College with its football stadium-like silhouette, and the municipal monstrosity that is Belshill Maternity Hospital. The architects are at their best when they use the tenets of Modernist architecture alongside a dramatic and lyrical aesthetic. The buildings are most effective when the monotony that Modernist architecture can engender is played off against curvilinear forms. When this breaks down or is unrealised, as in St Paul’s at Glenrothes with its absent circular church hall, the overall concept and final building could be described as failing.
Many visitors who do not reside in Glasgow and its sprawling suburbs will be familiar with the firm’s work due to the clamorous protests and petitions that have taken place over the threatened masterpiece St Peter’s Seminary at Cardross. The building has now rightly been placed on the World Monument Fund’s list of the 100 most endangered sites. This building alone is a wonderful example of how late Modernist ideas, filtered through the International Style, can create a breathtaking and inspired
example of religious architecture, while also providing a poignant reminded
of how such a building, now useless in the eyes of the Catholic church, can fall into an almost irretrievable state of desolation. (Alexander Kennedy)
Fallen Rocks
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PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM OBI GERSHT Stills, Edinburgh, until Sun 20 Jan 000
In the dark back section of the bisected Stills space. Ori Gersht's Video installation ‘The Forest' intermittently emits the overwhelming roar of trees being felled. Meanwhile. a series of photographs entitled “The Clearing takes pride of place at the front of the gallery space. Detailing a landscape wrought with personal and historical tragedy, Gersht seeks to capture a sense of absence. His theme is heightened by the intelligent deosron to record these landscapes in the photographic medium. which is itself entangled With the frustrations of loss.
A photograph is often taken in a bid to ‘capture' something; to render it immortal. Thus. there is something of a false promise in its indeXical nature. Gersht's blurred photographs of snowy landscapes resist exactitude. As the eye struggles to find a point of restful focus upon their surface. senSibIe meaning slips from grasp, and yet these images continue to arrest. They contain no greater meaning. however, or truth of the past. Ungratified. we are left only With the anticipation of the next booming disruption from 'The Forest'.
With suc recognisable iconography. and a much repeated technique. Gersht could be criticised for lacking originality. Yet. while these works are not Without a subtext, their strong evocation of the immutability of loss testifies to their independence. Appropriately. this powerfully subtle exhibition portrays the South West region of Ukraine. a land haunted by the atrocities of genocide in World War II, and a place struggling with the impossibilities of memory.
(Rosalie Doubal)
08 TH! LIST 15—29 Nov 2007
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PHOTOGRAPHY MARJOLAINE RYLEY Street Level, Glasgow, until Sat 22 Dec 0000
The exhibition of photos by Sunderland-based Manolaine Ryley at Street l we, does exactly what we now expect photography to do in the eternally ex; lélll‘il .ii: post-modern moment — register and present absence.
Ryley's photos are taken in the Brussels home of her grandmother; they for All. on the flotsam and jetsam that is common to the home of almost every rtirlrtrl,‘ person, stuff that gathers in corners and moves silently over the furniture. [/lHii, tissues and dish towels. The bOredom and the kitsch highlights of a suburban household are familiar subjects, but this tOpic :s not usually handled this successfully.
The series of photographs have been taken from the artist's personal f,(;|l(:r,ilrir‘., an archive that spans 12 years and records the many times she has Visited and stayed With her grandmother. This means that the resulting images are both highly personal and occasionally cold — separating out the old woman's belongings like eVidence from an uncommitted Crime. This feeling of alYllflvalffllU: is continued in the text printed on the gallery wall, where a KristeVian sense of comfort and claustrophobia is expressed to describe the maternal relationship between daughter and grandmother.
This is a well th0ught—Out and formally intriguing exhibition, With abstract images of the edges of curtains. the blank space where a picture once hung and the gold fringing round the base of a sofa hanging beside and rubbing against the body of a very mortal woman. (Alexander Kennedy)