VISUAL ART | Previews 124 THE LIST 5 Nov 2015–4 Feb 2016
PAINTING & SCULPTURE MODERN SCOTTISH WOMEN: PAINTERS AND SCULPTORS 1885-1965 Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Sat Nov 7–Sun Jun 26
Long before the current crop of female Scottish artists started making waves, generations of women painters and sculptors paved the way for everything that followed. This major show of more than ninety
works, from familiar names including Joan Eardley and Phoebe Anna Traquair to less well-known but just as significant figures, bookends its time-frame from when Fra Newberry became Director of Glasgow School of Art to the year of Anne Redpath’s death. In the years between, the doors were opened to women artists in a way that was unprecedented as they seized on new liberties in a way that allowed them to express their art as never before. Not that it was easy, as the exhibition makes clear by framing it in the context of the conditions female artists negotiated as students and practitioners due to their gender. Given that it moves through the age of suffrage to a more seemingly swinging age, the new research on the period which feeds into the show alongside a permanent display of prints by Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham should make for fascinating and inspirational viewing. (Neil Cooper)
DRAWINGS, SCULPTURE & VIDEO HARDEEP PANDHAL: HOBSON–JOBSON Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat 14 Nov–Sun 17 Jan
This exhibition of new work by Glasgow-based artist Hardeep Pandhal forms part of Collective Gallery’s ongoing Satellites Programme for emergent Scottish artists. Pandhal is a British artist from Birmingham who graduated from Glasgow School of Art’s MFA in 2013. Since then, he has exhibited across the UK, appearing in Bloomberg New Contemporaries in 2013 and creating a public artwork for the Glasgow International in 2014. He creates drawings, knitted sculptures and videos that interrogate the legacy of post-colonialism in contemporary Britain, with his distinctive satirical, black humour. Pandhal experiments with non-linear approaches to storytelling and frequently relies on autobiographical content in his artworks, examining his family’s multicultural past and his childhood memories of growing up in a Sikh community in Birmingham. The title of this exhibition is derived from a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases produced in the Victorian era during the British rule of India, which contains a range of crude adaptations of foreign words into English.
The work created for this exhibition follows Pandhal’s own ongoing research into the complexities of national identities and languages and brings together a range of new pieces, including reworked home videos and his characteristic, tongue-in-cheek drawings. (Rosie Lesso)
PHOTOGRAPHY ISLAND DRIFT: NVA, JAMES JOHNSTON AND ALAN MCATEER Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, Sat 14 Nov–Sun 24 Jan
NVA have been creating public art for the last 25 years, using light, sound and movement to transform urban and rural spaces through temporary and permanent installations. More used to creating work designed to be viewed where it was made, this project marks a departure for them. The light installations made by NVA’s creative director Angus Farquhar, designer James Johnston and photographer Alan McAteer for the ‘Island Drift’ project (with the help of a willing group of park rangers) were made solely to be seen in photographs.
Together over the past year, the artists have created a body of dramatic new work set in Loch Lomond & The Trossachs National Park, exploring the natural landscape through a variety of creative photographic techniques and light interventions. The digital images they produced during this time document the movement of light over large areas of land and water. Combining elements of their own temporary, introduced light with naturally occurring sources has allowed the artists to create textural, atmospheric images filled with depth and space. Their photographs will be displayed as a series of light box images arranged into a quadriptych in the Street Level Photoworks space.
When seen together, the artists hope to reveal a greater understanding of the islands stretching across the southern reaches of Loch Lomond and the topography of the Highland boundary fault line. (Rosie Lesso)