This Week in Scottish Art: Gold Panning & more

Glasgow Exhibitions

Koppe Astner and Mary Mary kick off the openings this Friday at 6pm. In Koppe Astner, more than forty artists will be exhibiting newly commissioned works. Not much is given away, except the names. It’s a nicely mysterious way to open the week.

Upstairs in Mary Mary, there are performances throughout the evening from 6-9pm by California-based artist Alexis Teplin. For the exhibition Drag, Push, HOOT, Teplin has conceived a new short play of the same name. References are taken from Harold Pinter plays, Nina Simone’s Mississippi Goddam, and other diverse instances of film and poetry. The performance is backdropped by abstract, colourful unstretched paintings, repeating themselves in the costumes of the actors.

A little walk away, Telfer Gallery opens up the new show of work by Glasgow-based artist Ben Skea. Incorporating 3D printed sculpture, moving image and sound, Skea takes interest in the object-viewer relationship and the information exchange involved in turning computer data into material processes. Previewing between 6-9pm, make a stop here before heading on to the third stop in this art crawl, painter and sculptor Marco Giordano's new show at Voidoid.

Working with found imagery, Giordano overlays these with bright colours and marks that are more than familiar to anyone who has made use of MS Paint's paintbrush tool. Mostly random marks, the relationship between the screen and under-image is based on a kind of irreverent tenuousness rather than a deliberate and direct comment or formal relationship. With photos underneath usually referencing Christian religious iconography, there’s a refusal to let their associations saturate the work.

Giordano's work also includes sculptures, usually without clear form, and featuring inscribed phrases like “where do we go from here”, “I paint what I see”, and “Bless the sheep”. After the opening from 7-9pm, the night goes on just along the road in The Poetry Club, where there is the afterparty from 10pm until late.

From 7pm this Saturday, in the Market Gallery in the East End of Glasgow, there is an evening of performance from emerging artists based in Glasgow, under the banner of Gold Panning. After being taken gold panning in the hills, they’ll be performing the ‘gold collected.’ Previous performances from those participating have included Katherine Jane Ashill's interpretation of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights via Cliff Richard, and Andrew Black's self-berating meditation on the ambiguous place of the film Hannibal in his teenage years. Here’s Luca George’s film work from last year, 'I’ll Never Get To Nirvana'.

Art in Edinburgh & Dundee

In Edinburgh, Hardeep Pandhal’s exhibition in the Collective Gallery continues until 17 January 2016. With his work spanning drawing, sculpture, video and knitting, in this instance Pandhal is researching processes of translation and ‘vulgar adoptions of foreign words into English.’ This exhibition also continues Pandhal's interest in ‘re-worked autobiographical materials such as home videos, to tell conflicted stories around the artist’s own identity.’

In Dundee this Thursday, there is an exhibition talk by London Royal College of Art Professor Emeritus Andrzej Klimowski, on the trend of collage in Polish art, the theme of the current exhibition in the Cooper Gallery. Drawing from his own experience of designing film titles for Polish TV and as an experimental filmmaker, Klimowski will discuss the liberating potential of collage for artists. He will also track some of the key relationships of influence within Polish collage art and design. RSVP if attending; the free event takes place between 6-7pm this Thursday.