VISUAL ART | Reviews
FILM & PAINTING JULIE BROOK: MADE, UNMADE Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, until Sat 1 Jun ●●●●●
For this large-scale multimedia collaboration with Dovecot Studios, Julie Brook has attempted to bring the wilderness with her and site it within a darkened gallery space. Although she lives on Skye, it’s the hot desert tones and ambience of her working trips to Libya and Namibia which inspire this particular transportable landscape. The exhibition explores various forms and media, but
undoubtedly the centrepiece is the aggregate selection of video works which fill the walls of the main gallery. Presented in near total darkness, they surround the viewer on multiple screens, causing a sense of disorientation – or perhaps gradual reorientation – as the eyes and mind adjust to the overwhelming sensory input. One might find oneself travelling in a circle around the room, trudging as if adrift in the desert. On the screen, men gouge away at a crescent of red earth and sandstone under a hot African sun and another digs a pit to get to the clay-red sand beneath. All of this is watched dolefully through the camera’s subtly-shifting mass of different perspectives and soundtracked by the distant echo of labour and a cool breeze against the microphone. Elsewhere a decorative red-skin pigment from Namibia named
otjize has been used to uniformly stain a large-scale multi- canvas painting which sits alongside a hand-tufted rug in the same tone by the Dovecot weavers. Meanwhile, sand-coloured pigment has created geometric painted shapes that complement photographs of Brook’s precisely-manipulated shadow and tone ‘drawings’ in the desert sand. The combined effect is to establish the cumulative feeling of the landscape and the sensation that Brook was there and left her mark upon it into the gallery. It might remind you of Rothko and his assistant in the play Red, searching for not just the colour but ‘the emotion of red.’ (David Pollock)
PHOTOGRAPHY GARRY FABIAN MILLER: THE MIDDLE PLACE Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, until 13 Jul ●●●●●
The Middle Place is Bristolian photographic artist and gardener Garry Fabian Miller’s personal viewing area from which he can eyeball the seasonal synergies which have made him an acclaimed international artist. It’s best to start upstairs with this exhibition, for here hangs Miller’s formative explorations and within them lies the key to all his work. The original eight images in ‘Sections of England:
The Sea Horizon’, taken in 1976 from the roof of Miller’s home at Clevedon looking west across the waters of the Severn Estuary, open the space. Over the next 20 years Miller extended the cycle to over 40 images, all of which line the walls here. Their skies heave and change, horizons flatten, there’s shimmer and chop and even a lone gull. The lens, film and exposure are fixed, and yet change is the only constant here. The complete ‘Sea Horizon’ is an extraordinary and timeless work.
Downstairs are Miller’s huge, camera-less Rothko-like abstracts with their burnt oranges, sea grass blues and bordered darks. They evoke Maya Angelou’s testimony that, ‘the horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps of change’. (Paul Dale)
114 THE LIST 16 May–13 Jun 2013
INSTALLATION CAROL BOVE: THE FOAMY SALIVA OF A HORSE The Common Guild, Glasgow, until Sat 29 Jun ●●●●● SCREENPRINTS CIARA PHILLIPS: AND MORE Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Gardens, Edinburgh, until Sun 23 June ●●●●●
This exhibition at The Common Guild presents Carol Bove’s work for the first time in Britain. With an adept and highly poetic consideration of the gallery space, the show displays a variety of found objects, from driftwood, peacock feathers and seashells to what appears to be fishing net hung almost as a room divider. The quality on display is of such high standard, with polished brass frames and pristine plinths, that it feels alien and enigmatic, resonating beautifully with the immaculate whitewashed walls of this tenement townhouse turned gallery space. Such is the integration of the art works and the space, that you find yourself gazing around at the fireplace or window fixtures with renewed vigour; this encapsulates The Foamy Saliva of a Horse which plays with commonly held associations of value and beauty. A steel beam suspends a great lump of eroded and weather-marked polystyrene which, from a distance, appears as a boulder of marble or another precious stone, right in the heart of the eerily white spiral staircase. In all, Bove achieves a remarkably concise, erudite and illuminating exhibition which is well worth a visit. (Michael Davis)
X marks the spot in Inverleith House’s latest show in which a contemporary artist responds to work in the RBG’s archival holdings of botanical- based art. Arriving just in time for the sun to belatedly shine, and running alongside ‘Nature Printed’, featuring actual examples from the RBG collection, Canadian-born, Glasgow-based Ciara Phillips beams down a series of groovy-looking screenprints brandishing vivid colour blocks that gets back to nature in homage to publications by eighteenth century nature printer Johannes Kniphof. Amidst the abstractions there are blurry archive images of hourglasses and lush, lime- coloured landscape splodges amidst the flora and fauna.
The show’s centrepiece finds the gallery’s central column of walls wallpapered with a blanket of watery, ice blue and white prints, on top of which is draped a banner-like large-scale print of two yellow pencils, crossed like swords. While referenced in several smaller works, here, fully-sharpened and rubbered-up, the pencils appear to be prepared to repel all borders. It’s a triumphal-looking flag of convenience one could readily imagine blowing in the wind. (Neil Cooper)