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K R A L C H T U R
VisualArt
REVIEW PRINTS & INSTALLATION SCOTT MYLES: THIS PRODUCTION Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sat 10 Jun ●●●●●
It makes sense that the site of DCA used to be Scott Myles’ playground. Back then he was a skater boy and it was a bricks-and-mortar garage re-imagined as the sort of makeshift skate-park for local heroes and future high-flyers, which, under the Scottish Government’s recently imposed changes to public entertainment licensing laws, would today be illegal. For his first major UK solo show, the Dundee-born and
trained artist has reclaimed the building’s interior with an even more playful flourish in DCA’s latest world- turned-upside-down subversions of everyday work, rest and play. Mass production consumables are reinvented for some half-remembered dreamscape as retro Habitat reproductions are painted black and stuck to the first gallery wall, while a swivel-seat skeleton on a chat show platform has a giant prism where its seat should be. ‘STABILA (Black and Blue)’ is a series of 24 screen- printed images taken from courtroom evidence of the injuries incurred when one workie attacked another with a spirit level on a Glasgow building site, turning tools you can trust into weapons of another trade beyond the flesh wounds and hard knocks of Auf Wiedersehen Pet- style manual labour.
The trail bridges into the second gallery, where the
sort of imagined red-brick wall that did for John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos is split into a full-size 3D jigsaw. The word ‘BOY’ posted up in orange letters on 1980s hoarding conjures up the clatter of baseball- capped, baggy-panted hip hop. It’s a gang mentality that’s reflected, too, on the two bus shelters painted perfect silver, one on top of the other to loiter with intent beside. Emotional debris of a different kind can be seen in the oversized folders customised with splash-paint splurges that cause Myles’ filed-away ideas to spill over into a stoner’s paradise. That’s livin’, all right. (Neil Cooper)
K R A L C H T U R
REVIEW PAINTING & COLLAGE TONY SWAIN: DROWNED DUST, SUDDEN WORD Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, until Sun 8 Jul ●●●●●
REVIEW ART BOOKS PAUL THEK: IF YOU DON’T LIKE THIS BOOK YOU DON’T LIKE ME The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Sat 2 Jun ●●●●● REVIEW DRAWINGS & PAINTINGS CALLUM INNES, WORKS ON PAPER 1989–2012 Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 14 Jul ●●●●●
There’s a deliberately seductive art to the design of a newspaper page, but only within the uniform rigour of the reader’s expectations. Northern Irish artist Tony Swain subverts these norms by using the materials of newsprint as the starting point for abstract painting canvasses, their intentionally disposable nature reappropriated for permanent gallery display. Text is all but absent: ‘you are 3400km from your home and family and 550km from the nearest international airport’ informs one painted-over block on ‘Five Die Cutting Star’, its landscape of snow-capped peaks and palm-fringed lagoons a particularly British dream of escape to the perfect climate.
The most successful works here aren’t the ones constructed around abstract, almost Dadaist visual associations or the concrete geometry of ‘First Time With a Lasso’, but rather those dystopian exaggerations of their source material: The burning sky over a wrecked container field of ‘The Flavours Disappear’; the jackboot crunch of ‘One Dressed As Many’; the mesmerising study of a ruined ecology in the centrepiece ‘As Well’. (David Pollock)
‘I will now call to mind our past foulness and the carnal corruptions of my soul’ goes one missive culled from the now opened pages of almost 100 notebooks left behind by Brooklyn-born painter and sculptor Thek, which came to light following his death in 1988. Given the sculptures and installations that formed the body of much of his work from the 1960s Technological Reliquaries series onwards, where one might expect blueprints for the environments shown at this year’s Thek retrospective at the Whitney in New York, one is hit instead with something infinitely more personal. Such a panoply of autobiographical scraps and
dreamscapes lays bare a candid close-up into one man’s self-absorbed but self-aware quest towards a higher state of being. Thek’s ruminations on art, sex and spirituality are Me-Generation precursors to a similarly confessional Zine and blog culture that followed. The works beyond this are big-bang stream-of consciousness splodges of colour, finished products borne of a self-analysis captured in the notebooks for precious posterity. (Neil Cooper)
Callum Innes’ explorations of material processes are well demonstrated in this first exhibition dedicated to his works on paper. Abstract images of colour familiar from his paintings on canvas fill the space, each one creating particular tensions, hinting at the removal and addition of paint, and suggesting the processes and techniques used to create it. The exhibition contains several series’ of work: two walls of the gallery upstairs are filled with a sequence of 18 watercolours, each of which appears to be a single block of translucent paint, but reveals through slight imperfections the layers of pigment that have built up a more complex image. These quiet works sit well with the larger paintings, which, both fragile and weighty, engage the viewer with real intensity.
This body of works is consistent and beautiful, but even a series using ground chalk sticks – described as ‘reverse sculptures’ – breaks little new ground. The exhibition demonstrates the tension, richness and depth that is already familiar in Innes’ paintings, but there is nothing truly unexpected in this otherwise engaging body of work. (Rhona Taylor)
24 May–21 Jun 2012 THE LIST 135