VISUAL ART | Reviews
SCULPTURE MARIANA CASTILLO DEBALL CCA, Glasgow, until Sat 18 May ●●●●●
Anthropological detritus forms the bulk of ‘What we caught we threw away, what we didn’t catch we kept’, a new body of work by Mexican artist Deball, which was co- commissioned by Cove Park and the Chisenhale Gallery in London, where it transfers later in the year. Deball’s starting point is the work of artist Eduardo Paolozzi, anthropologist Alfred Gell and explorer and archaeologist Alfred Maudslay, who learnt how to make paper moulds of ancient sculptures while on an expedition in 1881 in Guatemala. Deball herself excavates the trio’s work to make a series of papier-mâché sculptures based on the templates the three set down. Taken out of the forest and into a gallery space, each dried-up artefact is imbued with a monumental state of grace that’s part homage, part re-appropriation to give an eerie sense of isolated and undiscovered worlds. Set against a series of archive images of the original casts, traps and other artefacts that inspired this show, there’s a sense of hand-me-down souvenirs being fed from their roots to the global village that Debell seems to occupy.
If there’s a danger here of ethnic fetishism, it’s undercut by a wide-open sense of tranquillity, which allows you the space to wander without ever feeling overwhelmed by the unfamiliar. With much of what’s on show laying crumpled in tree-like formation on the floor, it’s also the nearest most of us will get to such exotica without it being behind glass cases or else transposed into mass-market tat for those in search of faux-authenticity. In this way, we’re all explorers here, and if it’s a jungle out there, Debell has tamed the beasts unleashed for a more meditative way of being. (Neil Cooper)
PAINTING RACHEL MIMIEC GoMA, Glasgow, until Mon 27 May ●●●●● SCULPTURE & PRINTS MARILENE OLIVER: CONFUSAO Edinburgh Printmakers, until Sat 11 May ●●●●●
When GoMa’s soon to be outgoing associate artist Rachel Mimiec led workshops with children at the Red Road Family Centre Nursery, her own line of inquiry with blocks of colour led to ‘Plough’, a body of work in which pages from issues of National Geographic daubed, splodged or scribbled over.
In terms of style and substance, there’s little to distinguish between the children’s paintings and Mimiec’s own work in this three-room installation. Which, for a show that looks at collective creative action, is how it should be. Landscape and nature are paramount to the
experience, especially with the inclusion of Horatio McCulloch’s 1866 landscape painting, Loch Moree, crucially hung upside down. It’s a topsy- turvy cock-a-snook to the subject’s more formal representations that comes from a sense of fun more than subversion. Yet it’s the intimacy of the printed matter that resonates most in a show that blurs the boundaries between community and solo practice to create something bright, brash and flag-wavingly, panoramically partisan in terms of embracing the shared experience where being both viewer and participant are as vital as each other. (Neil Cooper)
106 THE LIST 18 Apr–16 May 2013
In the accompanying literature, Londoner Marilene Oliver provides an impressively idea-packed insight into the layers of conscious metaphor in her work. One line has particular relevance to what she does: ‘playing with disillusioned promises that technology will endlessly improve and save us.’
Conceptually and visually, the work on display here
is highly impressive. It is a series of representations of the human body formed from designs initially procured by means of MRI or PET scan. The results are painstaking and often dazzling.
These include ‘Otzi: Frozen, Scanned & Plotted’, a series of pixelated points drilled into a freestanding case and lit so as to represent a ghostly, pale white cross-section of the human form; 'Exhausted’, a series of engraved images on white plastic strips strung out as if showing a body dissected into thin sections; and ‘Orixa’, where this scanned human image has been once more ‘pixelated’ as a physical representation, this time thousands of multi-coloured beads woven into thin segments and again showing the internal contours as if part of a laboratory dissection. The effect is a nicely sustained tension between the idea of the physical form reduced to a set of data and the tactile way Oliver has set about making these forms ‘real’ once more. (David Pollock)
FILM WILLIAM E JONES The Modern Institute, 3 Aird’s Lane, Glasgow, until Sat 25 May ●●●●●
Three film-works by this Los Angeles-based provocateur take archive documentary footage, then, by recontextualising each one via collaging, cut-ups and other treatments, liberates them from their authoritarian origins. 'Shoot Don't Shoot' (2012) draws from out-dated police training footage designed to educate trigger- happy boys in blue when to fire at a suspect. As a hip-looking black dude walks down the street, the stentorian voice-over sounds straight out of 1960s TV cop show, Dragnet. Both speak volumes about how institutions function. With two scenarios edited together, the non-linear result looks like cops and robbers as done by Godard.
There are more dual images in 'Bay of Pigs' (2012), which features split screen footage of US fighter planes bombing Cuba. This makes the planes look as though they were on some perfectly choreographed collision course, which, in a way, they were. 'Actual TV Pictures' (2013) juxtaposes flickering images of US bombings of Vietnam with images of TV sets that beamed out the news footage. Projecting the films to cover the gallery's three big walls, Jones has gone public with a crucial exposure of power games normally kept hidden from plain sight. (Neil Cooper)