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list.co.uk/visualart Previews & Reviews | VISUAL ART
PREVIEW SCULPTURE VANESSA BILLY: SUSTAIN, SUSTAIN Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 21 Dec
Swiss artist Vanessa Billy creates unlikely conversation pieces, bringing together found objects such as lightbulbs, vitamin pills and rocks with her own elements made in traditional art materials including paper, bronze, concrete, glass and resin. In exploring these contrary combinations between the familiar and unfamiliar, she invites us to reconsider our preconceived ideas about the objects that surround us in daily life. ‘It is very hard to break through the surface of what you know, or think you know,’ she explains. ‘It’s about being able to have an experience again with something, so being able to see it in a different light.’
The playful and often childlike nature of her artworks
resembles the backyard experiments of other well-known Swiss artists such as Fischli / Weiss or Roman Signer, who also draw upon the arte povera tradition of searching for the hidden, conceptual possibilities within dilapidated or discarded materials. But her sculptural works use materials that relate more to the environment, in all its messy, complicated reality; Billy is all too aware that ‘natural’ is now a muddy and obscure term open to interpretation. Her response to this ambiguity is to let some elements of her sculptures appear to have aged naturally over time as if shaped by elemental forces, such as her bronze and concrete casts, while others are as delicate and light as a tied-up bag of water or a crumpled sheet of paper, shaped by the ‘natural’ movements of her own body.
Billy’s display for Collective Gallery’s City Dome is her first solo exhibition in Scotland, creating a new body of work for this site that explores the ways in which natural resources are used and abused in the endless quest for innovation, and asking us to consider what sustainability really means today. (Rosie Lesso)
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REVIEW PRINTS NANA SHIOMI: REVERSE UNIVERSE Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh, until Sat 1 Nov ●●●●●
The nature of duality, says Japanese artist Nana Shiomi in her self-penned programme notes for this exhibition, is at the heart of her work. Merging the traditional style of her home country with everything she has learnt since moving to the UK, these woodcut prints dwell upon ideas of east and west, the national and the international, and the change of viewpoint that a shift in perspective brings. Up is down, left is right, and seemingly easily read views require greater effort to divine what’s going on than might initially have been expected. Japanese-style rooms reflect back upon
themselves, a staircase inverts across two halves of a print and a house sits perfectly reflected in water. The simple geometric perspective of a floor viewed apparently from distance, straight lines of the floorboards receding towards the horizon, is also one which Shiomi plays with continually, whether showing them reflected in carefully positioned mirrors or placing objects upon them. In particular, one diptych that shows 3D waves in the style of Hokusai’s ‘The Great Wave Off Kanugawa’ provides clear ground between Shiomi’s intent and the firmly traditional printing technique she’s chosen to use. (David Pollock)
PREVIEW MIXED MEDIA JONATHAN MEESE: PUMP UP THE VAMPIRE, PUMP UP THE VAMPIRE, PUMP UP THE VAMPIRE, SMELL! Glue Factory, Glasgow, until Sun 2 Nov REVIEW GROUP SHOW AULD ALLIANCE CONTEMPORARY EXHIBITION Institut Français, Edinburgh & E.D.S. Gallery, Edinburgh, both until Sat 1 Nov ●●●●●
‘Meese was invited by (curator) Linsey Young to play the total game of Art in the Glue Factory. Meese will collect most of the work / toys for the „Artevolution“ in Glasgow.’ You’ve never really interviewed someone, even via email, until you’ve interviewed someone who refers to themselves in the third person. ‘Meese brings the „Dictatorship of Art“ to the Glue Factory. Meese will show a total evolution installation. Meese will fill the Glue Factory with love, passion, propaganda and radicalism . . . Meese presents the total power of art.’ Jonathan Meese was born in Tokyo and has been
educated and based in Germany all his adult life. He’s a multi-disciplinarian; the show title refers to his opinion of writer, curator and friend Roberto Ohrt (‘a vampire who pumps blood back in’) and M/A/R/R/S’ 1987 acid house hit ‘Pump Up the Volume’. ‘Art only loves Art. Art destroys everything that is not Art,’ adds Meese. ‘Art is the most natural enemy of all ideologies. Glasgow and Berlin are both headquarters of total Art. Glasgow and Berlin should totally ban all ideologies and start to be playgrounds of art.’ (David Pollock)
French fancies abound in this group show of work from nine artists – five French, four Scottish – across two galleries that bridge the gaps between Edinburgh’s New Town and the city’s West End. This is made explicit in Samantha Boyes’ florid constructions, which at first glance look like afternoon tea is being served, until you notice the assorted stuffed birds’ heads and nesting wildlife.
This sets an anthropological tone that sees much monkeying around throughout. Where Jacob Kerray’s chimps in military drag come on like dressing-up-box tinpot dictators, Dix10’s pistol- packing infant taking aim at a kids’ entertainer’s dog-shaped balloons in fatal repose gives similarly subversive edge to such otherwise cutie-pie subjects. Elsewhere, few do this better than Rachel Maclean, with her explorations of national identity by way of day-glo heritage-industry kitsch.
While there are no concrete connections between artists other than geographical, diversity, conflict and the tensions between the two seem to be the point. Roma Napoli’s arm-wrestling Action Men and Paella’s duelling bagpipers in particular show just how fragile alliances can be. (Neil Cooper)
16 Oct–13 Nov 2014 THE LIST 105