Sonica 2013: Picture Window

In November, as part of Sonica, shop fronts in Glasgow became impromptu gallery spaces for the public art project Picture Window. Five venues welcomed a range of visual, sonic and interactive installations to surprise passers-by and dedicated art aficionados alike. Justyna Ataman and Amy Pickles' The Fame of Us consisted of an impressive original music video followed by the scenes deleted from the finished product. The artists exposed the cracks in the construction of their own idealised world. Thomas Leyland-Collins exploited the context of a shop front to explore excessive consumerism in his installation Conducting Commodities, wherein a dozen TVs showed repetitive adverts.

The slight ungainliness of some pieces was due to the conscious or unconscious decision to turn the store into an exhibition glass case, and this was so for William Aikman, Ariane Jackson and Nicola Reade, who used white mannequin busts and geometrical shapes as canvas for abstract projections in Gushet. Fracture/Intersection by Ev Buckley also had a more sculptural approach, depicting urban industrial settings in a well-built screen-to-screen installation. On the experiential side, All Eyes Wide produced the uplifting Gate: Start Here, an interactive sonic installation in which the barefoot, blindfolded and headphone-wearing viewer was invited to explore a delimited space where sound changed according to the chosen trajectory. To do this required courage from the participant, but s/he was rewarded by a sensual exploration of a safe haven.

The three closing night events gathered curious onlookers. In Gordon Douglas's compelling To Health and To Sickness, performers inside a store read a tense dialogue projected on the shop front. Matt Collings in All In The Name of Gravity and Trudat Sound both combined visuals and sound, creating hypnotising live performances to end the night. [Melanie Letore]