This Week in Scottish Art: Psychic Love and Utopian Failure
An exhibition by two French brothers duo, GSA decamping (temporarily) to ECA, and telling stories to paintings at the Talbot Rice – it's all in this week's art news. And if it's all too much, there's a Body-Mind Centering® class as well...
Behoving of the circle of life, one exhibition closes this week at Dundee Contemporary Arts while another opens. Ending this week is an exhibition by Jackie Smith, her short run exhibition – Flashy – consisting of a series of prints that have been created by “drawing with the eyes”. Employing the Eye Can Draw tract developed at DCA, Smith has made drawings that are jerkily drawn, following the quick path of her own darting eyes. For the exhibition, she displays a series of digital prints created using this technique.
And two days later, on Saturday, comes the launch of an exciting exhibition by French brothers Florian and Michael Quistrebert, which we highlighted in last month's New Year events guide. New information released on Vision of Void promises the largest exhibition of the brothers’ work in the UK, and a presentation of “hypnotic abstract videos and paintings”.
Over at the CCA in Glasgow, there is Flats, by Jennifer Bailey. In the Intermedia space until 14 February, Bailey displays photographs of her sister on custom supports. This work is situated within “the politics of the occupation of space and surfaces and the mechanisms of subjectivity.” Also in the CCA this week, there are performances to see as part of Romany Dear’s project Dancing in a Circle is a Reminder that we are Part of the Whole. There will be two different performances at 1pm and 5pm daily on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday; the exhibition is open on Wednesdays and Fridays with no performances, and closed Mondays. As well as all that, there is a one-off workshop this Sunday by Katy Dymoke, for Body-Mind Centering®. This is a free workshop, but ticketed - see here for tickets.
This Friday, there is the closing event for GSA at ECA. Across the Glasgow School of Art and Edinburgh College of Art, final year students have brought their work together in the ECA's Sculpture Court. It’s a nice moment of collaboration between the two otherwise completely separate institutions. The event will begin at 5pm on Friday. Staying in Edinburgh this Friday, there is a storytelling night from 6pm in the Talbot Rice gallery to accompany the exhibition by Christopher Orr. Until Only the Mountain Remains encourages imaginative responses to Orr’s work from academics and creative writers.
For those of you in Glasgow this Friday, there’s the opening for The Politics of Craft: After Ford 151 at 6-8pm in the Reid Gallery. This exhibition was developed by Grizedale Art, a curatorial project based in the Lake District. The exhibition takes the Arts and Crafts movement as a site of resistance and “utopian failure”. Given pride of place in the exhibition will be a representation of the ceiling of St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, which was an extreme expression of modernist architecture, and now an exquisite ruin.
In Project Ability, there’s a solo exhibition by Lea Cummings, titled Infinite Psychic Love Explosion! which runs until next week. The works are made with marker pen, and are loudly abstract with whirling shapes and patterns clashing against each other. Cummings’ various multidisciplinary works “relate to distort, noise, time, archetypes, symbolism and the subliminal.” In the first floor of the Glasgow Print studio from Friday, there will be an exhibition by Colin Johnstone, titled The Romance of Iron and Cortisone. Showcasing Johnstone’s print works, he occupies “a space between old and new, complete and incomplete, handmade and multiple.”
And bringing this week's events full-circle, we're back in Dundee. Last week we gave you the news regarding the call for submissions for the GENERATOR members show. That call is over, and now it’s time to look forward to the members’ show itself. The preview will take place this Saturday 7th February, with the show itself running until 1 Mar.