VISUAL ART | Previews & Reviews
PREVIEW MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARIKA, EPISODE 6 – MAKE A WAY OUT OF NO WAY Tramway, Glasgow, Fri 26–Sun 28 Sep
When the Arika organisation took a side-step from curating experimental music festivals, they started to lay the groundwork for their current programme through multidisciplinary events like Instal and Kill Your Timid Notion. The more holistically inclined series of themed Episodes they then embarked on seemed to chime with a renewed hunger for ideas and seditious thought. While Episodes still featured performances and screenings, they were consciously not made the centrepiece of events that involved discussions and debates that questioned the relationship between artist and audience. In Episodes 4 and 5, Arika concentrated on the musical and political liberation expressed by the black community through jazz, and similar transcendence from the queer and trans community through the House Ballroom scene. Episode 6 in part fuses both experiences in Make A Way Out of No Way, which over three days looks beyond the nuclear family conformity of primetime mainstream to the deliberate political and artistic choices required to do something more rebelliously wayward.
Artists taking part in Make A Way Out of No Way include
radical black poet Fred Moten, queen of black working class dance form, Krump, Miss Prissy, and operatic diva M Lamar’s performance of ‘Speculum Orum: Shackled to the Dead’, a queer black requiem. ‘Race is an invention and a fiction,’ says Barry Esson, who, alongside Bryony McIntyre, has run Arika since the organisation’s inception 13 years ago. ‘Sex is an invention and a fiction. All sorts of these definitions are used to normalise us and control us. This Episode is looking at that, and how different communities come out of that and learn to express themselves within that landscape.’ (Neil Cooper) ■ See Clubs, Music and Theatre listings for further details.
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PREVIEW INSTALLATION CONOR KELLY: DO YOU FEEL LIKE WE DO? CCA, Glasgow, Fri 19 Sep–Sat 4 Oct REVIEW DRAWING CLAUDE CLOSKY – 10, 20, 30 AND 40% Summerhall, Edinburgh until Fri 26 Sep ●●●●●
Conor Kelly’s show at CCA’s Intermedia Gallery marks something of a departure from his previous work. Rather than looking at history and historical characters, here Kelly takes apes and monkeys as his subject, using images from the internet and rendering them realistically in paint. These works will be shown alongside a series of abstract paintings.
‘This show is a little bit different,’ the Glasgow-
based artist says. ‘It’s less about history and more about the function of painting. I’ve worked a lot with history before but this is more about asking what these paintings are doing right now.’ Central to the exhibition is the way in which people perceive meaning where there is none. Kelly has used extracts from Breakthrough by the psychologist Konstantin Raudive who, in the 1960s, attempted to record the voices of the dead, and instead rediscovered the notion of apophenia, or pareidolia.
‘It’s an example of where you hear what you want to hear. It’s that notion of what exactly is there and what do you just perceive to be there? This show is considering the social aspect of painting and trying to tie in these notions of what’s actually there and what isn’t.’ (Rhona Taylor)
96 THE LIST 18 Sep–16 Oct 2014
They could be pages torn from an art-zine, an architect’s portfolio or a sketchpad given to pre- schools on a rainy day. Such is the playful but matter-of-fact show-and-don’t-tellness of French avant-savant Claude Closky’s new series of miniatures. Spread across four rooms in ascending or
descending numerical order, depending on which way you go at it, a series of black ballpoint-pen lines mark out assorted patterns on white paper sheets that fade into the background of barely-there clip- frames or matching white wooden ones.
The lines themselves sit side-by-side by Claude Closky, or form squares, curves and triangles that could have been created using an old-school Spirograph set or Etch-A-Sketched into being. The percentages themselves, scrawled at the bottom of each sheet like an exam mark, are a big hint at what’s missing, with either 90, 80, 70 or 60% presumably beyond the frame and occupying somewhere bigger.
With brown wrapping paper and green card cut-outs the only colours of the spectrum beyond neutral on show, they’re not the only things here that aren’t black and white. (Neil Cooper)
PREVIEW PAINTING BRIAN CHEESWRIGHT: 36 YEARS OF BRAIN-FEED Interview Room 11, Edinburgh, Fri 19 Sep– Sat 18 Oct
‘I am searching for a certain crudeness or awkwardness in my work,’ says Edinburgh- based figurative painter Brian Cheeswright’s artist statement on his website. ‘I like to organise problems into my painting and to leave a sense that they are slightly unresolved. From this I hope the viewer can find a way in to the picture and not find the image is hermetically sealed from dialogue.’ He describes himself as an expressionist painter,
yet there’s something about the odd shapes, colours and perspectives he applies to his characters which is almost naive in tone.
‘Basically I’m showing a load of paintings I’ve been making over the last few years that have been stacked up and accumulating dust in my studio,’ he says. ‘This is their opportunity to get some colour in their cheeks while I and those who come to see the show decide if they’re actually any good.’
‘They’re the manifestation of my practise,’ he adds. ‘I’m taking a risk by not really self-selecting my best pieces but throwing in pictures of various quality, some I may have even grown to detest. It’s a guts and all cross-section of my output, good and bad.’ (David Pollock)