This Week in Scottish Art: Indy Ref Symposium
From now until next week, there's something to do every day across Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow
Starting fast, Wednesday 23 September sees the Glasgow Artist Guild X taking place at Saramago, with talks from Nina Bacos and Alistair Quietsch about their respective practices. With a practical PhD from Glasgow School of Art, Bacos will discuss her socio-political photography practice while, somewhat distinctly, Quietsch draws from her experience as a member of a clown-art collective, and now her roles in musical performance and art therapy. Their presentations begin at 7pm.
Onto Thursday 24 Sep at 6.30pm in Rhubaba, it’s the circularly titled reading group and accompanying exhibition, Now we know what we need to do: We need to know what we need to do. Generally, the subject of the reading group relates to the themes of self-organisation, the workspace of the artist and the conditions that can affect the artist. The next reading group meet-up take places on the 8 October, also from 6.30pm.
On the morning of Friday 25 Sep, The Common Guild begins its series of events surrounding Thomas Demand’s latest photographs of detailed paper models, this time coming from every day snapshots in The Dailies, with a talk at the Goethe-Insitut at 11am. Later in the day, The Common Guild previews the exhibiton from 6-8pm.
Self-organisation is the theme again throughout Friday in Glasgow’s CCA with the symposium for The Shock of Victory. From 9.30am until 5pm, there’s a schedule of presentations from 'international and local curators, artists and academics', reflecting primarily on the potential for radical alternative ways of organising for artists and art institution – or more specifically, 'collectivism, anarchism, activism', with reference to last year’s independence referendum. Tickets are £11 (£5.60), with lunch provided.
Later that day, from 6-7pm in the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, there's a talk by current Micro Residency artists Eleanor Clare and Dillan Marsh. The Norway-based Clare produces hallucinatory, richly costumed and musical performances, and is a member of Performance Art Bergen, while Marsh makes immersive installations with a boldly coloured graphic aesthetic.
Koppe Astner also preview their group show that day: Here Too I Exist includes the work of artist Aaron Angell, one of our top picks for Glasgow International 2016. There is also Avery Singer, known for black and white paintings of computer drawing programme Sketch Up,plus heavily coded and symbolised paintings by Caragh Thuring, collaborative duo Peles Empire, who work with large scale torn-down looking prints, and Emily Wardill, generator of enigmatic film works.
It's a busy weekend in Glasgow, in fact, with openings throughout. To round out a jam-packed Friday, Mary Mary preview their new exhibition I hope to God you’re not as dumb as you make out, with three artists working across the fields of painting, drawing and sculpture; based variously in New York and Los Angeles. Matthew Brannon’s visual art is influenced by his interest in expressive writing, often exhibiting whole novels he has written alongside his paintings. His work is set aside from Milano Chow’s drawings, which take their cue from the presentation conventions of advertising. The final part of this three-person group show is Alan Reid, who often presents work that resists the categorisation of abstract, figurative, sculptural or functional, while considering the kind of misunderstandings and ambiguities inherent in social exchange. The preview takes place between 6-9pm.
Onto Saturday 26 Sep: first off in the Kinning Park Complex, the Telfer Gallery presents a series of screenings related to Charlie Godet Thomas’ exhibition To be is to do, To do is to be, Do be do be do (as mentioned last week), and interrogates the connections between making a living and making (art)work.
Later on, French artist Nicolas Deshayes displays the results of his residency in Glasgow Sculpture Studios, with his glutinous and industrial-looking distortions of ordinary materials previewing between 6-8pm.
On Sunday 27 Sep, 3-6pm, Glasgow’s newest exhibition space Celine brings together established artist duo Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys with Aniara Omann, recent MFA graduate of GSA. The gallery itself speaks of its intention to continue this kind of cross-career stage artists’ exhibitions, with a mixing of local and international practitioners. While de Gruyter and Thys have built a two-decade career from dark video works, Omann works across a variety of media, adding elements to objects in order to confuse the initial starting points. This kind of ambiguity allows Omann to draw less obvious parallels between, for example 'celebrity identity and ancient objects.'
Finally, in Dundee, the Summer Residency exhibition in the Cooper Gallery continues, with work that questions the application of philosophy to an object-based art practice.