Rugs, Birds and Yes Men: This Week in Scottish Art
Hospitalfield opens its doors and takes a good look at its gilded interiors, while Dundee goes print-mad and Edinburgh exhibits Gary Fabian Miller, who finds himself without the medium he's spent three decades exploring
On Wednesday (24 Jun) in the Art School on Scott Street, there's Perform and Party. From 7pm, as the practical part of a research conference broadly looking at the creative possibilities of computing, six performances are planned by artists and researchers. As promised in the name of the night, after the performances there is a DJ/VJ set from Alex Harmonic until late. Until Friday this week (26 Jun), there is also an exhibition accompanying the Creativity and Cognition Conference in the City of Glasgow College's Charles Oakley building on Cathedral Street.
From the virtual to the more tangible printmaking process, in Edinburgh Printmakers, Paul Charlton’s exhibition Breathless continues until Friday this week (26 Jun). Charlton displays a body of work that exploits the embossing process, creating images of birds that appear only in the shadows of the impressions made on the paper. The resulting reliefs of seagulls, sparrows and pigeons are small, delicate and not really done justice by online images that seem to show only a blank piece of paper.
Edition Two, an exhibition by Dundee Print Collective, starts this Friday in Dundee’s Hannah Maclure Centre. 30 screenprinters will display work as part of the event which follows on from the successful Edition One in 2013, as part of Print Fest Scotland. More details are to be released, but the closing part of the Print Fest will also take place in the HMC, with bands and DJs performing in the exhibition space.
Print Fest also makes its way to Dundee Contemporary Arts, with a host of different print-themed activities through this weekend and the week ahead. There’s a range of different afternoon and evening workshops and demos, including Printerama on Sunday 28 Jun at 3 and 5pm, an Oriental Pad printing demo on Tuesday 30 Jun from 5-7pm, and after-work Print and a Pint sessions from 5:15-6:30 from Monday to Thursday next week (29 Jun-2 Jul).
There will also be a new set of prints launched to coincide with the Scottish premier of The Yes Men Are Revolting this Sunday (28 Jun), also at DCA. Collaborators Jacques Servin and Igor Vamos, as part of a long project, are the self-styled Yes Men Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno. Naomi Klein lauds them as the sophisticated satirists of the Jackass generation. With the same guts as Sacha Baron Cohen, there will be as many gut-twistingly anxious moments of brass-necked daring. So far in their career, the Yes Men have impersonated the World Trade Organization, Dow Chemical Corporation, and Bush administration spokesmen on TV and at business conferences around the world. Taking aim at policies that impact destructively on the environment, their pranks come from a sound social conscience.
Back to Glasgow and this Friday night, Caitlin Merrett King, Isabella Widger and Hannah Reynolds mark one year since their graduation from GSA with their first collaborative project together. With the title Everything Sensor referring to a specific plot device, the artists also attempt to complicate usual authorship by making works individually, but with conscious and heavy reference to one another’s practice. With a preview event between 6-9pm this Friday, the exhibition continues at Glasgow Project Room until 4 Jul.
This Friday night also brings Hospitalfield’s open weekend, with screenings, discussions and workshops from filmmaker John Smith, art and design duo Atelier EB and filmmaker Stephen Sutcliffe. Broadly looking towards the ornament and decoration of Hospitalfield itself, the dinners, discussion and screening events are free, while there are paid tickets for those who’d like to camp overnight, and there is a £5 charge for the screenprinting and bagmaking workshop on Sunday afternoon.
Until 4 July in Edinburgh, Garry Fabian Miller exhibits two new gun-tufted rugs created in collaboration with Dovecot Gallery. Since the 1980s, Fabian Miller has created large scale camera-less photography. Recently, however, with the discontinuation of Cibachrome paper, he has found himself without access to his usual medium. So it’s an interesting start of a collaboration between Fabian Miller and Dovecot, as the late-stage career photographer finds himself out of necessity re-evaluating his practice and influences.
Also into its last fortnight, Luke Fowler and Mark Fell exhibit a new film work in The Modern Institute’s Aird’s Lane. In To The Editor of Amateur Photographer, Fowler and Fell respond to the contested history of the first feminist photography centre in Leeds, the Pavilion. An electronic soundtrack complicates an already fragmented narrative as Fowler and Fell navigate the archive of the organisation.