P H O T O C O U R T E S Y O F T H E A R T S T
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VISUAL ART | Previews
PRIVATE VIEW Tom Carlile
Tom Carlile graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design five years ago. Since then he has exhibited widely across Dundee, participating in shows with Dundee Print Collective, Generator Projects and WASPS. In February, Carlile will have his first solo show in Edinburgh at the artist-run The Number Shop
Since graduating, have there been any important milestones in your practice? In early 2011, I was fortunate enough to be in a studio that had access to a workshop. This was pivotal in allowing me to make the kind of work that I wanted to make. Prior to that, I had been constrained to working on smaller scales or with photography in order to maintain my practice.
How are you feeling about your forth- coming show at The Number Shop? I’m excited to show with them and looking forward to learning a bit more about their artist studios and meeting everyone. I think it's great that they are operating affordable studios alongside their exhibition space.
What kind of work can we expect? The show is titled FRACTURES and displays a combination of sculpture, film and photography that explores the ongoing child abuse investigation, Operation Yewtree. It examines the perpetrators and victims, the media's involvement with the investigation and a perceived social desensitisation to the crimes themselves.
Are you nervous about presenting work on such a sensitive issue? The work confronts in a visceral and uncompromising way the brutality of these acts whilst remaining sensitive to the complex context in which they exist. It’s heavy but, I think, accessible subject matter. My hope is that people will persevere with it and not write it off as ‘shock-art’ for want of a better term. The titling of work has always been very important to me and in this show many of the titles allude to alternative interpretations. (Interview by Rachael Cloughton)
■ FRACTURES is at The Number Shop, Fri 6–Sat 14 Feb.
92 THE LIST 5 Feb–2 Apr 2015
FILM MEN GATHER, IN SPEECH Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, Dundee, until Sat 21 Feb
For Men Gather, in Speech, curator Sophia Hao has brought together Rose English, Abri de Swardt and Emma Charles. It’s the artists’ complex relationship to dialogue and the voice that will be studied through the exhibition. ‘While it’s a site for the act of seeing,’ says Hao, ‘the gallery is an intersection with dialogue and critical engagement where new ideas, perspectives and possibilities take shape.’ Each artist will be represented by work taken from different stages in their career with English screening ‘Plato’s Chair,’ a work from the 1980s, when she’d already established herself as an inl uential performance artist. It’s a seminal piece, heralding the appropriation of speech and the voice within the visual arts.
South African artist de Swardt presents a i ctionalised and impossible conversation staged between artists Paul Thek, Derek Jarman and Félix González-Torres. ‘I’ll never wear sunglasses again’ is a i lm which places naked performers in an empty, white void while the voice alternates between pure,
theatrical and queer elucidation.
London-based artist Charles exhibits ‘Fragments on Machines', a i lm that visualises the internet’s physical mechanics and its vast depositories of circulating sediments of speech, video, image and text. These technological spaces, while inhabiting and cultivating dialogue and the politics of its transactions, paradoxically reveal loss and disappearance. (Alex Hetherington)
INSTALLATION LAURA ALDRIDGE: CALIFORNIA WOW! Tramway, Glasgow, until Sun 22 Mar
‘More often than not,’ explains Surrey-born, Glasgow-based artist Laura Aldridge, ‘my work is positioned on a precipice of wanting to act upon an impulse, particularly a sensory impulse of wanting to touch and feel and simultaneously be felt by material and texture. It’s at this intersection that I’m able to investigate the physicality and tactility of processes. I’m motivated by the notion of the body experienced as both object and subject.’ All of which is vital to understanding her latest work, an installation created especially for the
interior of the Tramway in collaboration with architect Iain MacLeod. California wow! is a large, pink Perspex room built in the heart of Tramway, which the viewer can step inside to view the space and a selection of external sculptural works through this pink i lter. It’s an ‘expanded collage’, says Aldridge, a graduate of both the Wimbledon and Glasgow Schools of Art and a former exchange student at CalArts in California. The work aims to encourage the viewer to think about what lies behind the construction of this ‘landscape’ and both how it responds to its setting and how we physically respond to it. ‘I think the unifying idea for me is that I believe that art is a free space,’ says Aldridge of her body
of work in general. ‘You can draw on multiple sources and misuse and misunderstand them; from that you can generate something that really speaks or sings, even. Something happens when I make work, in that my intentions aren’t always retained. It has a life of its own and becomes what I didn’t expect, a thing in itself. I like to be surprised by it, because for me the worst thing would be to get bored of my own work.’ (David Pollock)