Pyramid Selling, Basketball and Psychosomatic Tourism: This Week in Scottish Art
In this week's Scottish art round-up, there are new shows at Telfer and Collective galleries, a pair of launches at Good Press, and a host of other events in Glasgow, Edinburgh and beyond.
We start this week in Edinburgh, with Serena Korda’s The Hosts: Ectoplasmic Variations which opened on Friday at Rhubaba. For the show, Korda has fabricated “an army of ceramic warriors” that are variously “wounded, amputated and punctured”. With the Rhubaba Choir, Korda will call these jug-like sculptures to arms. Right now, the choir is open to new members, and interest can be registered with an email to info@rhubaba.org. A new musical score will be delivered by Korda and the Rhubaba choir on Saturday 2 May; The Hosts will continue until 10 May.
Staying in the capital, it’s the very last chance to see The Living Mountain by calligrapher and painter Susie Leiper. For this presentation, Leiper presents landscape works inspired by the Munros, the Pyrenees and the sacred peaks of China. On at the Open Eye gallery, Leiper’s show closes tomorrow (Wed 22 Apr).
Keeping an eye on tomorrow, from 6-9pm Good Press host a book launch for Elsewhere, a photobook by Glasgow-based Danish photographer Albert Elm. In this work, Elm “collects photographs dissecting a particular sense of isolation and psychosomatic tourism”. And later in the week at Good Press, there’s the opening event for an exhibiton of work by Malcy Duff, from his two new comics 'The Stagnant Water Inside A Bath Duck' and 'I Trimmed A Tree So A Lorry Could Pass'. Along with drinks, there will be readings from the new works. Sat 25 Apr, 3-7pm.
On Thursday evening, established multidisciplinary artist Graham Fagen will deliver a talk at Hospitalfield in Arbroath in advance of his exhibition for Scotland+Venice at the Venice Biennale. In next month’s magazine, we talk to Fagen about growing up in Irvine more interested in dub poets than any Scottish culture, and how he came to be exhibiting a reggae version of Robert Burns’ The Slave’s Lament.
Glasgow-based sculptor Mick Peter is the subject of a solo exhibition in Tramway, which previews this Thursday from 7-9pm. Titled 'Pyramid Selling', Peter will present a new body of sculpture which continues his interests in illustration and graphic design, this time looking to the “witty graphic design from the 60s and 70s”. Often scaling up smaller logos and drawings, Peter’s work was seen in Tramway's Hidden Gardens’ last summer as part of the GENERATION exhibition, where he exhibited scaled-up and robust versions of quick line doodles of stylised hippies.
Also on Friday in Glasgow, in the VoidoidARCHIVE (next to SWG3), group show The Grind opens featuring work from Jennifer Bailey, Brandon Cramm, Alex Impey, Katie Schwab and Maria Toumazou. Run by Jim Lambie, the Voidoid Archive and its space are the subject of the works included in the show, and curated by artist Lauren Hall. Tying the group together, “all reflect intently on the situations within which artists work, and the conditions under which their work adjusts itself.” From 9:30pm, there will be an afterparty in The Poetry Club with readings and performances.
There is also a new show to catch at The Telfer Gallery this Friday, with the preview of the new exhibiton by Beth Kettel running from 7-9pm. Kettel is based in Manchester and within her practice considers the “obscurity and potential of objects and language”, often borrowing formats and structures from “elsewhere such as song writing, theatre, recipes and sport”. For Post-Point, and/or, The Sequential Tangential Potential, Kettel borrows from the rules and language of basketball. Before the preview at Telfer, there is an opening performance at the Wasps Artists’ Studios, 77 Hanson Street, from 6pm.
In Edinburgh this Friday from 6-8pm, Collective gallery unveils two new shows in their City Dome and also as part of the Satellites Programme. In Lektor, artist collective Slavs and Tatars situate self-help books in an obscure medieval context in a multi-channel audio installation. Meanwhile, Satellites participant Thomas Aitchison has developed a new series of delicately painted works on dustsheets dotted with marks from previous use. In these works, he quotes “a host of imagery including landscapes, food and corporate insignia.”