I Want To Be Your Dog @ Glue Factory

The blurb for I Want To Be Your Dog proclaims it to be ‘an exhibition that isn’t about anything in particular.’ With a star-studded line-up of artists inhabiting the perpetually pleasing Glue Factory, this elusive pre-opening teaser feels like a humorous downplay of what is sure to be a mega success. 

The entrance is promising. An arresting, ultra-hypnotic Beagles and Ramsay video effortlessly engages an entire room with chilled-out beats and stripped-back monochrome splendour. Somewhere between a propaganda campaign and trendy nightclub visuals, objects that are distinctly sausage in theme spin amongst pulsating ecstasy-esque smiley faces and statements that shout silent orders like ‘SELL A LUNG TO FEED THE KIDS.‘ Yes! We’re ready for this, bring it on.

And then the music disappears and there are just dogs – dogs everywhere.  A digital collage that references C.M. Coolidge’s Dogs Playing Poker series, an oil painting of a greyhound dressed in a Mondrian costume, a model dog wrapped in lacy tights. There are hobby-paintings of dogs, dogs dressed in gimp costumes and even a video from a dog’s-eye-view. 

Amid what sadly comes to feel like a lot of filler pieces are a couple of league-of-their-own gems that magnetise the crowd. One is Rachel Maclean’s Over the Rainbow; the other is Vanessa Donoso Lopez’s kinetic installation with found objects, which – as far as anyone can tell – refreshingly has nothing to do with dogs other than having the word ‘Bitch’ in the title. 

If you treat the dog as a medium, and look really hard, you might find themes of submission being investigated in works like those by Richard Kern and Bryan Derballa, or an exploration of identity through costume. It is about dogs though, isn’t it? And the jury is still out on whether that can be a legitimate curatorial concept. [Emma Ewan]