This Week in Scottish Art: Glamour, Rumour & Public Transport

We get the jump on the Edinburgh Art Festival and present the usual motley range of events across Scotland, including art walks, a new art soap screening and a band of amateur photographers.

Feature by Adam Benmakhlouf | 14 Jul 2015

We kick off this week at The Skinny's new home, Summerhall, which has a whole raft of exhibitions finishing tomorrow (Wed 15 Jul). There’s work from Modern Edinburgh Films School, Henry Coombes, Lucy Skaer, and many, many others. Sorry for the short notice, but definitely head along if you can – they're open til 6pm today and tomorrow.

Edinburgh Art Festival is now close on the horizon. If you can’t wait for the mass of openings coming to the city coming at the very end of this month, the Fruitmarket’s headline show of work by Phyllida Barlow is already underway, along with Photograhy: A Victorian Sensation in the National Museum of Scotland.

Also running as part of the EAF, there’s an exhibition on Lee Miller and Pablo Picasso at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, if that’s your sort of thing, while as mentioned last week, France-Lise McGurn's exhibition '3am' is open in Collective. Have a look through the 29-image slideshow over at McGurn's website to get an idea of what to expect.

In Glasgow, in the Gallery of Modern Art, the top-floor exhibition Ripples on the Pond has been going on quite quietly for a few months now. Though it hasn’t received much publicity, it’s an interesting show which sets up a dialogue between the recent acquisitions of the Glasgow Women’s Library and the Glasgow Museums Collections. There are a range of screenings arranged by Modern Edinburgh Film School, while within the space there are paper works from Carol Rhodes, Ciara Phillips and Roni Horn, to name a few. The exhibition runs for the remainder of the year, until 28 Feb 2016.

This Thursday in Tramway, from 7:30pm, there is the screening of The Sixth Year. It’s a reinterpretation of the TV series format and a reflection on "gossip-based art", and takes the New York art world as its subject for its five episodes. Based on interviews with curators, artists and collectors, The Sixth Year dramatises the interactions, the glamour, and extravagant personalities of this specific art community. Preview the project here – admission is £3. 


Ross Fraser McLean explains the origins of his work - his Blue Sky photo club exhibits at DCA this week

On Fridays both this week and next, Claire Shallcross – Creative Lab Resident at the CCA – will be conducting Friday Walks. Both will leave from the foyer of the CCA and will be accessible by public transport. The details of the first walk will be released by the CCA on their social media channels on Wednesday; the details of the walk on Fri 24 Jul will be released through Facebook and Twitter at the same time next week.

Staying in Glasgow, and this Saturday in Good Press there’s the launch of A slowly built burner, “a grouped effort of narrative endeavours”. With an emphasis on “how words, images and things found lying around might stitch together to make a kind of sense", this opening event takes place from 3-6pm. Read more about the project in July's art overview here.

Also at the CCA this week is The Printer’s Devil, by Sarah Rose. In the installation, the Glasgow-based Rose considers the associations of printmaking with its role as a medium of information proliferation. Ultimately, the installation turns into "a series of rumours: corrupted translations, cumulative errors, abstractions and transformations”. The Printer’s Devil continues until Sat 25 July.

Back in Edinburgh, Paloma Proudfoot is exhibiting The Jockey at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop until 26 July. It’s the culmination of a month-long residency completed by Proudfoot in the workshops, and sees reference being made to The Jockey by American author Carson McCullers, as well as the “eclectic newsagents of Leith”.

Also until 26 July, up in Dundee, past Skinny Showcase artist Ross Fraser Mclean is running an exhibition of his Blue Sky Photography Club. He’s put together 21 self-published photo books by Blue Sky members, which are now on display in the Print Space at Dundee Contemporary Arts.

http://theskinny.co.uk/art