Birthdays, Catapults and Juvenile Delinquency: Scottish art news for July 2015

Opening the month’s art events, on 4 July it’s the finissage of David Dale Gallery’s Finite Project Altered When Open. Marking its first five years, the current exhibition opened empty and over the course of its run invited participants (around 80) installed works as the show progressed. All participants have worked with the gallery before, making the project into a kind of summary of the gallery’s existence so far.  “On the 4th July we stop, call it an exhibition and have a party,” say the gallery. All invited.

Saturday 4 July also marks the opening of Roman Signer’s Installations at Dundee Contemporary Arts. Playfulness takes priority over obvious concern for health and safety, as Signer plans to work with cannons and catapults. Experiments with space, time and chance have been at the core of Signer’s practice for four decades. In DCA, Signer will try to knock over a grid of standing wooden posts, launch a kayak (a recurring motif for Signer) into a wall, and fill a second kayak with 200 litres of whisky. There's more whisky as a steel cannon is pointed at an open tent, while electrical fans blow bottles of Scotland's golden nectar in circles. The exhibition will continue until 20 September.

Edinburgh Art Festival begins formally on 30 July, while elements of its programme start around the city throughout July. Collective Gallery's EAF offering is in the form of the Satellites Programme, with France-Lise McGurn’s exhibition previewing on Friday 10 July, 6-8pm. Often working expediently in paint, her practice is wide-ranging and derived “from a non-indexical album of collected imagery and moving image files.” This “improvised archive” is variously the reference and surface of McGurn’s works, and shares “themes such as identity construction, gender portrayal, juvenile delinquency, and the ephemera of social communion.”

The Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art’s Festival of the Moving Image Season closes with Phil Collins’ Tomorrow is Always Too Long. Beginning with a birth, the film presents an idiosyncratic and musical vision of Glasgow through the lens of different institutions, from the school to pub to prison. The work’s soundtrack makes a rich blend of Glasgow band Golden Teacher, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, welsh pop songstress Cate Le Bon and Mogwai’s Barry Burns. Originally presented last summer in a one-night only event in Glasgow Queen’s Park, the film is on loop in the GoMA from 10 July until 17 August.

In Good Press, there’s an opening event for a Slowly Built Burner on Saturday 18 July, from 3-6pm. Featuring 12 contributors, the project is touted as “a grouped effort of narrative endeavours.” The emphasis is on “how words, images and things found lying around might stitch together to make a kind of sense and/or be placed somewhere or in a specific context to unfurl and build new reasonings.” With terminology and expression kept loose, Good Press plan a mixture including (but not limited to) drawing, comics, poetry, art writing and collage.

Throughout July, there will be a couple of events in The Common Guild to accompany Anne Hardy’s exhibition Twin Fields. Across the spaces of the gallery, Hardy has created two large scale installations that respond to the specific structure of the rooms they inhabit, within the three-and-a-half storey Georgian townhouse. On Saturday 25 July Dominic Paterson will present his thoughts on the work “and its relationship to mirroring and doubling.” Then, at the end of the month on 30 July, the gallery will host a roundtable conversation with contributions from artist Sarah Forrest and Artistic Director of the Glasgow Sculpture Studios Kyla McDonald.