Soft Chaos, Hot Air and Labours of Love: This Week in Scottish Art
This week sees a host of exhibition openings in Glasgow, a student response to an exhibition in Dundee, and a symposium on the economics of art in Edinburgh.
We start this week in Dundee, where as part of the Men Gather, in Speech... exhibition at the Cooper Gallery at Duncan of Jordanstone art college, the students give their response, entitled Hot Air. The main exhibition focuses on political dialogue – you may remember our preview from a few weeks back. For their exhibition, the Student Curatorial Team “focus on partial dialogue” and include films which are projected on “ephemeral media” and explore “fragments of previous conversations” to provide an opportunity to the audience to begin a new conversation by immersion into the space. Hot Air runs until Friday in the Cooper Gallery Project Space; Men Gather, in Speech… closes on Saturday.
In Glasgow's CCA on Thursday, there is an artist’s talk by Nathan Witt at 6:30pm. Witt has, for the last ten years produced an A4 text once a week outlining artworks "that don’t need to be made". The text alone, it is thought, is sufficient for the audience “to gain an idea of the artist’s motives”. Witt’s exhibition (titled A Interloper) is on in the CCA until Sunday.
Staying in Glasgow, it's one of those special weeks when there's potential for a gallery crawl, with openings aplenty this Friday night. First up is the opening for The Skinny Award-winner Rachel Levine’s new show Soft Chaos from 6–9pm in the CCA. Read more about Levine and what she has planned for the show in our recent interview with the artist. Meanwhile, in the same timeslot, there are two openings in the Dixon Street building shared by the two galleries Kendall Koppe and Mary Mary.
In Kendall Koppe, there are new works by Niall Macdonald, whose work focuses on fusing found objects in the process of casting. Upstairs in Mary Mary, Lorna Macintyre displays photographs from her personal extensive archive of photographic negatives, as well as “a series of new photograms created by folding material in on itself and placing it directly on the photographic paper", in new show Material Language, Or All Truths Wait In All Things.
Ahead of that excitement, there is the opening bash for something of a follow-up to last year’s A Picture Show, an exhibition of contemporary painters working in the city. For Ballet of the Palette at the Glasgow Gallery of Modern Art, the previous exhibitors have been asked to select paintings from the city collections, and the exhibition title is taken from Josef Herman’s 1942 painting, which will be on display. Thursday’s event is free and open to all, running from 5:30pm until 7.30pm.
Moving on to Saturday, in Edinburgh there is a public symposium by Collective at Basic Mountain. To stimulate discussion about art working and post-crash economics, A Labour of Love will feature contributions from several artists, including Ruth Beale and Amy Feneck, also known as The Alternative School of Economics. Within their practice as TASE, they study economics and in doing so, set a framework to address political, social and cultural issues. Tickets are priced at £10 and £5 concession, and can be booked here.
And finally, starting tomorrow and for the rest of this month, it’s Glasgow Film Festival time. As part of the festival, on Monday 23 February Glasgow-based artist Charlotte Prodger presents her experimental film Stoneymollan Trail in the Glasgow Film Theatre. The film was made after receiving the Margaret Tait Award prize. On Sunday, before the GFT showing of Stoneymollan Trail, Prodger will discuss her inspiration for the film, when she presents a double-bill of films by pioneering American artist Nancy Holt (1938-2014). These two events are part of Crossing the Line, a strand of films in the festival “where visual art and cinema meet”.