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VisualArt
REVIEW GROUP SHOW INFINITE JEST Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sun 26 Aug ●●●●●
With a title taken from David Foster Wallace’s footnote- friendly novel, going round in circles is the standout characteristic of all three artists in DCA’s summer special of a show. Where the videos of Brazilian interventionist Cinthia Marcelle subvert noisy cityscapes with meticulously orchestrated real-time arrangements, Rob Pruitt is all high- class paddling pools, monster-sized cookies and down-time denim. London-born William Mackrell continues the party theme with birthday cake-sized illuminations that may burn fast, but which leave a lunar-etched afterglow to bask in. There’s fire from the off via Marcelle’s video piece
‘Confronto’ setting out its stall on a monitor that wilfully obstructs the gallery entrance. Onscreen, a group of fire jugglers stop the traffic, increasing in number as their routine moves from red-light entertainment to green-light environmental alchemy. Marcelle’s ‘Volta ae Mondo’ (‘Round the World’) goes even further, as increasing numbers of white vans circumnavigate a roundabout ad nauseum. Such an elaborately choreographed urban merry-go-round resembles the staging of a heist – the Brazilian Job, if you will. Mackrell, too, explores the performative, the playful and the
political, from ‘90 Minutes’, in which a concrete football sits at the centre of the gallery waiting for kick-off, to the glorious ‘1000 Candles’, in which 1000 tea candles are captured as a photograph, on film and, health-and-safety permitting, from flame-on mode to last-gasp flickers. Onscreen especially, the effect is of some orbiting planet moving from dawn to dusk.
If Pruitt’s ‘Evian Fountain’ is a very expensive splash- about, his oversized and indisputably toothsome biscuits in ‘Pop-Pop’s Chocolate-Chip Cookies’ suggests Roald Dahl reconfiguring Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in Lilliput. Pruitt’s two takes on ‘Esprit de Corps’, meanwhile, fills classic blue jeans with concrete and cotton, then sews them together in a body-melding mirror-image which, as with Marcelle and Mackrell’s work, contorts reality enough to drive it round the bend. (Neil Cooper)
REVIEW DRAWING & GRAPHIC ART SARNATH BANERJEE Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow, until Sat 28 Jul ●●●●● REVIEW PHOTOGRAPHIC RETROSPECTIVE DAVID PEAT Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, until Sun 5 Aug ●●●●●
Billed here ostensibly as a graphic novelist whose works haven’t yet penetrated the Western mainstream, the Delhi-based Sarnath Banerjee’s gallery show presents his art in a whole different context.
Freed from the homogenous experience of flipping a book’s pages, the viewer is almost invited to inhabit the work, reading from one panel to the next between separate framed and hung sequences or along long stretches of card lain horizontally and folded into jagged peaks at the edge of each frame.
His images are strong, and many conflate a sense of the political and the mythical in a manner that suggests a first-hand understanding of Indian society will perhaps enrich the experience. Yet the sheer visual invention of Banerjee’s work is resonant throughout, and most often in the simplest of formats: a series of mysterious, limited movement diptychs in which, for example, a lazing café hipster has a moment of revelation in the gutter between panels or a placid, wrench-holding mechanic sits in a blood-splashed suburban sitting room. (David Pollock)
This retrospective of the photographic works of Scots documentary filmmaker David Peat is a subtly staggering collection of work: an eye-opening historical document, a rich exploration of the art of street photography and a masterful display of control in wringing the authentically human out of a cruel situation. The half of the show dedicated to his work in the condemned tenements of Glasgow in 1968 is the most resonant, focusing almost exclusively on children of an age that affords them a look cheek rather than real menace, as bright-eyed and often smartly-dressed young boys and girls tip paint on the pavement and brandish sticks at the camera amidst litter-engulfed, window-boarded streets which resemble those of a war zone.
Towards the end of the set a tentative picture of the future emerges, as sleek, modernist tower blocks emerge from the scorched earth of the old Glasgow. While Peat’s later collection of international street scenes isn’t so charged with the sense of a long-gone place and time, his technical skills and ability to select prints with humorous pathos have only increased. (David Pollock)
REVIEW GROUP SHOW DIALOGUE Edinburgh Printmakers, until Sat 21 Jul ●●●●●
There’s a pleasingly simple structure to this show by the Canadian printmaking collective Engamme that allows for an uncluttered and diverse exploration of a complex subject. A series of 26 diptychs, one from each exhibiting artist, examines issues of duality, exchange, action and reaction; each set of works offering a personal interpretation of different types of dialogue using a variety of techniques. Especially powerful are ‘Interstices I and II’, a pair of intense, almost claustrophobic, black and white collographs by Jessie-Mélissa Bossé that have a very clear dialogue taking place between them, with contrasting but complementary paces, rhythms, space, depth and intensity. Lisette Thibeault’s itaglio prints ‘In negative’ and ‘In positive’ seem the most obvious pairing of any of the diptychs, appearing initially to be one work of an intricate, symmetrical, organic structure, which has been printed again to create a negative image. The differences between the two prints are, however, far more subtle, and open the way for a much more interesting dialogue – not simply that taking place between the two images, but also between them and the viewer’s imagination. (Rhona Taylor)
19 Jul–2 Aug 2012 THE LIST 89