GSA Degree Show: Leaky Beautification

GSA Fine Art comes to its second year in the Tontine Building. With its odd features and kind of confusing layout, the students are confidently making use of the space to create ambitious and characterful installations.

Consider the little playpark made by the two slides independently exhibited by sculpture students Charlie Cook and Jonny Valdez. For Cook, he’s made a tile covered deathtrap. (Memo: this is the one you’re not allowed to slide on.) To top it off, he’s made a video of himself rollerblading off of the top. A cliffhanger, since the camera’s fixed and in slapstick style the clattering is the only indication of what’s happening to right of the screen. Stretching out to 10 feet or so, its slickness is made a signifier of hazard and injury – to top it off, soap’s been scuffed along the top of it.

Jonny Taylor has made his from timber and plywood, and the slide itself is wavy, making for a rough landing. Next door to Robert Mills’ moveable cardboard box installation, they’re flying the flag for interactive artwork. Taylor’s not done much to hide the materials or decorate the slide beyond some bright red shiny trims for the stairs. With the wood and joints not covered up, it’s still impressive but seems doable – like the degree show equivalent of an Instructable, an incitement to make more indoor slides.

Amongst the more conventional presentations, Mills and Taylor bring in some hands-on action. Particularly in the context of being a response to the demands of a degree show, Taylor’s slide becomes a kind of obstinately simple gesture of fun.

Down the road from Tontine, there’s the St Enoch Centre where there’s a Hamley’s with a life-sized elephant, called Elizabeth – according to Fine Art Photography Gemma Parsons’ video work. In it, she describes trying to steal the elephant. There's footage from a hidden camera of her walking through the shop with her face covered. It’s shaky, blurred and darker looking than it should be, making the interior appear cavernous and filled with palms, a red-pink carpet and bright twinkle lights.

The rest of her presentation is photographic, including a face printed onto a swimsuit. For the most part, her prints have an obvious subject, either single persons or objects presented face-on. There’s an interesting interplay between the video that describes trying to steal an elephant that’s too big for any door and the pictures of grey circle processed ham on square cheese, bread-shaped bread and a white circle plate. There’s an inescapable thingness that’s celebrated here, a kind of praise of tautology. Things might be complicated, but this is a sandwich and you can’t steal a fucking massive elephant from Hamley's.

There’s another kind of interaction in Rachael Simpson’s and Honey Jones-Hughes’ respective presentations. In Simpson’s, she’s set up a two row cinema, and is showing Westerns at specific times throughout the show, as a means for discussing the different issues, representations and roles at play in the films. For Jones-Hughes, it’s an opportunity to sell her publication and set up a series of talk events with speakers who have active roles in promoting the empowerment of women, DIY publishing and experience in public realm art practices. These come as important acknowledgements of the important place for events and participatory activity, especially within Glasgow.

Across the room, there’s Ash Kitchen’s ethereal looking oil paintings. Diluted to the point of looking like watercolour, they’re made up of a few washes across canvas. Underneath some of the framed works, there are shelves with sculptures made up of bra cups and fur – think of an oversized and plush acorn. While there might be some pallor in the rendering of the images, care’s given to them and the thin washes give them a feint underglow. Clean and neat, there’s a sense of remove and suspicion against a competing attraction to taking part in the glamour.

Working in black and white, and with dates appearing at the top right of the canvases, Felix Carr’s paintings come across as furious journal entries. With a layer of white paint on a black undercoat, it looks like the other side of a brush has been used to scrape handwritten screeds and line drawings. A $100 bill’s handed down at the top left of one, towards the big-thighed body whose arm smushes a dead looking head into the lower black band that runs across the corner triptych it’s part of. Text and image are brought to a mashing point, in an amalgamation/annihilation and makes for compositions that risk trembling into disarray. With long screeds and naked bodies, they’re something like a whiteboard left too long in an unattended class, or the partition of a public toilet - a whirl of quotations, poetry, dicks and butts.

Just changing the white walls of her space, Kitty Hall’s mixed in bits of black paint to make painterly clouds as the setting for a handmade sci-fi, sound, sculpture and painting installation. A V-motif goes across the works, but in spray paint they become rounded and blunted. References to an angular and sharp futurism are softened and made dingy, as the disjointed atmospheric sound piece hums like an old hard-drive or an idling engine.

On the floor, the V-shape becomes 3D on a rectangular panel that projects cones with spray-paint added, simulating a kind of directional lighting. They’ve got pools of water on them. As a grimy Blade Runner idea of what everything might look like one day, there’s a reminder that it’ll probably still leak.

There’s a cleaner edge to Mads Holm Jensen’s photographs, that mostly seem to have been taken early morning from the long shadows cast by the buildings and figures in them. One shows some rubble, another a traffic jam, and one a literal uprooting of a tree. Together, they become deliberately symbolic, and alongside governmental reports on dangers of social upheaval they’re visual representations of fear mongering rhetoric of overcrowding and upheaval.

As Jensen’s biggest print, there’s a figure wearing a large purple wolf suit, giving off the same threatening and ridiculous feeling as a robber in a porky pig mask. At a time when all hail Nigel Farage, it’s all an uncomfortably familiar progression of the laughably stupid turned terrifying.

Camille Bernard’s large paintings of crowded landscapes of unreal dimensions set up figures in ambiguous relationships. In one, a bent-over person grabs the ankles of another while someone else creeps behind. Is it violence or play? Their impassive faces and squat bodies don’t give anything away: expressions, gender, ethnicity. Grabbing at, or embracing one another, they tumble over and crowd into each other.

The two large paintings are installed with a hand painted TV box, bench, hand-painted flat cardboard trees and two medium paintings. There’s not much white space, setting up friction and closeness between the works, as the same figures fall over and fly upwards. Just as ambiguous, the video of peaceful masked animals that are hunted, then another of some kind of bestiality are without dialogue, silent parables providing excellent an dramatic soundtrack that progresses from splashing and breathing sounds to loud foley and cacophonous violin – then looping back again.

With just as effectively abrasive soundtrack, there is the Clara Hastrup's blue carpet orange walls video-installation. On the floor, heavy pink casts of oranges are kicked about next to beanbags printed to look like oversized and bulging pineapples. On the left (depending when you come in), there’s a hand sanding at a surface which becomes a picture then video of clouds seen from above.

Everything is completely post-produced, with the three videos oversaturated in pinks, purples and juicy blues. A stop-motion shows a hand cutting images of avalanches, in turn becomes the image to be cut. This is repeated, with hands cutting images of hands cutting images ... and they’re all moving. It’s only a short video sequence, but over three screens all playing something different but obviously synchronised, Hastrup has come up with many, many inventive ways of deconstructing images.

Up the stairs from Guitar Guitar, former workshop of famous inventor James Watt and with leaks here and there, there’s an impressive making-do and dignifying of the fairly neglected old Tontine building. With 107 students exhibiting across the two floors for the next week, there is still plenty more to see.