VISUAL ART | Previews & Reviews
DIY ARTS FESTIVAL GLASGOW OPEN HOUSE Various venues, Glasgow, Fri 28 Apr–Sun 1 May
Glasgow’s art scene prides itself on its grassroots, self-starting ethos: rather than waiting around for big galleries to come knocking, the city’s artists set up their own projects, collectives and artist-run spaces and make their own luck. Many of these have now become part of the city’s art infrastructure.
One of the most recent to do so is Glasgow Open House Arts Festival, where artists across the city simply open the doors of their homes over a long weekend and stage exhibitions and events in their bathrooms, bedrooms and back gardens (plus the occasional office and shop front). The festival is now being held every two years, alternating with Glasgow International.
With over 50 exhibitions and 25 events in the programme,
projects by art students sit shoulder to shoulder with established names. Marvin Gaye Chetwynd and her partner Jedrzej Cichosz will host screenings of films by acclaimed director Joanna Hogg in their Southside flat, while running a discussion group on the British class system in the kitchen. Ceramic artist Kevin Andrew Morris is building a hot tub in his garden, and inviting visitors to take a dip, help stoke the wood-fired kiln, or browse a selection of wood-fired ceramics.
Visitors to Glasgow Tool Library can spend a day building household structures out of recycled materials, while Alison McBride and Giovanni Giacoia aim to give visitors a taste of what it feels like to be an alien in a foreign land by inviting them to communicate in any language other than English (phrase books and signs will be available to help, and there will be cake).
Glasgow Open House’s Sonia Hufton hopes this year will build on the success of the previous two festivals. ‘It’s a great opportunity to share a large audience with a lot of people in a way that would be quite difficult to get on your own. It’s also a great way to get more opportunities to show your work.’ (Susan Mansfield)
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PHOTOGRAPHY FRANKI RAFFLES: OBSERVING WOMEN AT WORK Reid Gallery, Glasgow, until Thu 27 Apr ●●●●●
MIXED MEDIA BETWEEN POLES AND TIDES Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sat 6 May ●●●●● RETROSPECTIVE THE WEAVER’S APPRENTICE Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh until Sat 1 Jul ●●●●●
‘Observing Women at Work’ is one of the first major exhibitions by the feminist social documentary photographer Franki Raffles, who died in 1994 aged just 39. Raffles’ complete photographic archive is held at St Andrews University, and this exhibition takes three bodies of work from it, aptly demonstrating the scope and techniques that define her broader practice and her fierce, feminist agenda.
The stand-out work is Raffles’ Prevalence campaign for Zero Tolerance, a women’s charity she set up with Evelyn Gillan. Raffles deliberately stages sentimental scenes of domestic life such as girls playing together, reading with their grandmothers, or women sitting reading magazines beside the fire. Accompanying the photographs are hard facts on domestic violence.
Prevalence wasn’t made for museums; these were confrontational pieces designed to interrupt the public, jolting them out of their day-to-day life, rather than the privileged few who enter a gallery. However, the motivation behind this exhibition has to be to recognise Raffles’ practice, to observe the massive contribution of her own work to the history of Scottish documentary. Like the women Franki Raffles’ photographed and the stories she told, she too has been overlooked for too long. (Rachael Cloughton)
108 THE LIST 1 Apr–31 May 2017
In difficult times, getting back to nature is one solution, as demonstrated by some of the works in this group-based exhibition of new acquisitions from the University of Edinburgh art collection. However, things aren’t always as they seem in this series of works, as suggested by the leopard’s face looking out from Zane (2013), Isobel Turley’s two-second video loop of this most endangered of species. Filmed in Edinburgh Zoo, Zane’s steely gaze may
suggest he is guarding the other exhibits, when in fact he’s been immortalised in another, more Sisyphean form of captivity. The voiceover in another video, Daisy Lafarge’s Not for Gain (2016) hints at an even more invidious form of social control. In Katie Paterson’s Timepieces (Solar System) (2014), a row of wall-clocks points to the global interplay between such things.
With nature and revolution coalescing in three pieces by Ian Hamilton Finlay, the chief protagonists spookily rubbed out in Jonathan Owen’s Eraser Drawings (2014–16) and the university’s digital collection repurposed in Fabienne Hess’ Zebras, Blanks and Blobs (2017), this cross-generational showcase points to a quiet concern for worlds beyond the gallery’s borders. (Neil Cooper)
The title of Dovecot’s new retrospective of its own history may suggest something tinged with arcane magic, but the loom set up on one side of the room points to weaving as a living and painstakingly intricate art. Timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the untimely passing of Dovecot’s founding master weavers, John ‘Jack’ Glassbrook and Gordon Berry, both killed during WWI, the show journey’s through the centre’s past by way of a series of archival works that led to its current status. Notebooks, photographs and letters reveal a moving dedication to the weavers’ craft. At the show’s centre is the work of Dovecot’s current apprentice weaver, Ben Hymers, whose Untitled (Hipsters Love Triangles) and Penelope are vividly coloured imaginings, laced throughout with bronzed classical allusions that reference Homer’s Odyssey and Margaret Atwood, spanning the centuries as they go. These may be a far cry from some of the hunt-based works of old, defined by the epic scale of Glassbrook and Berry’s The Chace, but they nevertheless remain rooted in Dovecot’s own rich tapestry, in a vivid piece of living history threading its way towards the future with its ever-expanding legacy intact. (Neil Cooper)