VISUAL ART | Reviews
PRINT & SCULPTURE BRONWEN SLEIGH: CONSTRUCT Edinburgh Printmakers, until Sat 20 Jul ●●●●●
At first glance, this body of 38 architecture-based prints and 3D constructions looks like blueprints for some Russian Constructivist science-fiction futurescape, built for a Tarkovsky film by way of a Ladybird book. Look closer beyond the sleekly-angled swish of the lines, and you’ll see that these visions of the future were built some time ago, be it as airports, stadiums or other epically proportioned hubs of congregation, comings or goings as befits any international metropolis brimming with ambition.
There’s a utopian urgency at play here, in images of locales
ranging from Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris to Meadowbank Stadium and beyond, that look like nothing on earth. With everything seemingly in motion amidst a fanfare of metallic greens and bloodrush reds, there’s a wide-eyed sense of wonder in the stranger’s gaze of Bronwen Sleigh that suggests she too might have come from another planet. There’s something heroic in the wooden and wire constructions dotted about the gallery like some undiscovered stratosphere, implying a voyage of discovery at every turn. One imagines the theme-tune fanfares and sweeping strings
of Whicker’s World being piped through these re-imagined monuments as travellers pass through borders. Either that, or the des-res idyll of ‘Home is Heavenly Springs,’ the space- age installation brought to Princes Street Gardens by art/pop conceptualists Sudden Sway a quarter of a century ago.
While the practical day-to-day reality of these subjects – with all their failures, design faults and terminal obsolescence – will never match her unsullied visions, Sleigh is in one sense capturing a purity of an imagined future that went beyond mere functionality. In this sense, Construct is a form of legitimised nostalgia, both for a past intent on conquering worlds, and for an age yet to come. (Neil Cooper)
K R A L C H T U R
ILLUSTRATION & INSTALLATION JOHANNA BASFORD: WONDERLANDS Dundee Contemporary Arts, until Sun 7 Jul ●●●●●
So Carnaby Street retro-groovy is the charmingly decorative array of Johanna Basford’s faux Edwardiana inspired images that you can all but hear a wash of psychedelic harpsichords. To find a way into this first major show by the increasingly high-profile and cannily commercial Dundee-trained illustrator, one first has to navigate a maze-like forest of large-scale images of trees. Once inside, the plural of the show’s title becomes crucial through an array of crowd-sourced woodland creatures and cuckoo clocks, and prints with the word ‘LOVE’ emblazoned, all writ large in a series of baroque- curlicued black and white images.
Beyond the voguish (and indeed Vogueish) quasi- product placement in one of the smaller rooms, it’s the larger than life work that really matters. The coffee-table-magazine friendly wallpaper is epic enough in its overwhelming ornateness. But the leaf-tattooed showroom dummies and the sailing boat on which a fanciful voyage is projected suggests an imagination that is already looking towards ever greater horizons. For that alone, Wonderlands is worth jumping down the rabbit-hole to see it in all its bright-eyed glory. (Neil Cooper)
106 THE LIST 13 Jun–11 Jul 2013
SCULPTURE ILANA HALPERIN: THE LIBRARY National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, until Sun 29 Sep ●●●●● MIXED MEDIA JERRY DOWDS & REDJADE YUAN: CIRCADIAN SYMPHONY RGI Gallery, Glasgow, until Sat 15 Jun ●●●●●
Location is everything for this new exhibition by Glasgow-based, New York-raised artist Ilana Halperin, the first recipient of an artist’s fellowship at National Museums Scotland. Flying in the face of even the richest modern art’s essential ephemerality, Halperin’s muse is the Earth itself: geology and erosion and the history of the planet, and how we relate it to our own flicker of awareness within that. For The Library, she’s created museum exhibits as art, a collection of rock samples chosen for their story or geological interventions she’s staged herself. She places marble and coral alongside one another, both tactile and beautiful, and muses upon their origins as the remains of Earth’s first bacterial life. She shows a wooden stencil covered with a sparkling white mineral deposit formed when it was placed in the waters of Iceland’s Blue Lagoon. A crystal shard from the same country’s Eldfell volcano is shown, and there are fast-formed limestone sculptures created in unique cave conditions amidst the mountains of the Auvergne. Each re-introduces us to these specimens not as dug-up relics, but as evidence of the life our planet has lived and will continue to live. (David Pollock)
For the RGI’s Glasgow School of Art graduate prize show, it’s enriching to see a none-more-Glasgow piece of art displayed in the window. Two sheets of bubble wrap hang floor-to-ceiling, certain of their small spherical compartments filled with coloured liquid. It’s Irn-Bru, cherryade, lime cordial and mouthwash. There’s an amusing tension to it, the sense of protective sterility afforded by the wrap and the tooth-tingling sugariness of its contents. Among many other pieces, their creator Jerry Dowds also paints ceramic-finished images of toilets against their elegantly tiled backgrounds, and wistful images of council estates and streets as the grimy and the poignant clash with real resonance. Redjade Yuan’s work is similarly playful, mining
the artist’s memories for nostalgic resonance. This includes the description of a ceremonial procedure in which she soaked a giant handmade teabag in water from the Thames and poured in milk. In Yuan’s Japanese-styled pop art paintings, abstract assemblages of found or possibly personally valuable detritus, and porcelain sculptures of two nipples and a labia, there is a sense of awakening, a tension between innocent memories of youth and the raw experience of adulthood. (David Pollock)