DJCAD Degree Show 2014: Best in Show

Visiting the degree shows on the last day can be a poignant experience. The celebratory flowers that bloomed so brightly on that first day are now faded and wilting, filling the corridors with a weirdly funereal scent. Works that on the opening night were pristine are by now scuffed and bashed, in some unfortunate cases even broken down completely. Lesson learned – always go early.

One such example in this year’s Dundee show is Time Based Art’s Ryan Esson. His Void series is intriguing, photographic records showing coloured mist amidst trees and a personal statement revealing the Japanese-derived elemental inspiration behind the piece. His mirror-room installation upon which he was projecting these ethereal images is, unfortunately, by now roped off, the floor a maze of glass shards. A shame, it looked good.

Elsewhere in Time Based Art is Corpach, a collaborative project between Alan McIlrath and Jeppe Rohde. Billed as a prelude, the duo seek to take the short film to festivals through the magic of Kickstarter. The screening holds the audience in rapt attention, a temporally disorientating story set in the Highlands blending folklore and reality to form a sort of Scottish Twin Peaks.

Exhibited nearby but flying the flag for Fine Art is Edward Humphrey with One Who Has Lost Forgetting. His film and sound work is immaculately presented on two razor sharp silver screens propped across the corners of a blackened room. Shots of landscapes, scientific instruments, animal skeletons, running horses and, somewhat discordantly, a bit of two person football spool across the screen beneath a multi-voiced narrative incorporating academic lectures, personal opinions and quotes from Shakespeare, Ballard, Darwin, and Total Recall. That discordance is key – this is a meditative exploration of the fault lines between fiction, memory, reality; revealing their essential fallacies.

Next door, Abi Dryburgh’s Imaginative Geography explores notions of contemporary Orientalism and nostalgia in a pseudo-museum environment. She’s looked at the 90s cover imagery of video smash the Prince of Persia, and woven its likeness into a rug using the traditional Persian sehna knot technique, inhabiting the disconnect between a rich and complex cultural history and the blockbuster shorthand that throws everything into largely racist polarities. She’s also created distorted wax likenesses of the heads of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, exhibited as though artefacts beneath toy kalashnikovs entitled Old Toys: Throwing Bricks from a Great Distance. An accompanying risograph-printed text meditates on the casual disposal of cultural history in a short dialogue about a brooch.

While some students strive to engage with universal truths, others focus on documenting the world around them. Craig Wright’s Gangs of Dundee celebrates the city’s turf wars with a series of Soviet-influenced screen prints celebrating the different tribes (‘Young Kirky Hoods Fuck Yer Jug’). His Plotting Table creates his very own war planner, with a map of the city and labelled wooden pieces for each of the gangs to mark out their territories. Viewers are encouraged to label their own, drawing on memories of teenaged marauding.

A further exploration of Dundonian culture is offered by Abby Blair, whose Conversation Pieces reveals a vast archive of local eavesdropping. Abby has been writing down snippets of overheard local conversations and has created a coffee table book, limited edition paperback and sound work playing in her space. Intriguing fragments are rendered more elusive by the vagaries of memory and omissions caused by freehand transcription. The resulting oral history of contemporary concerns reveals our time to be mostly nonsense.

It wouldn’t be a degree show without at least one explosion of the glitter bomb. Molly Jacobs’ space is a riot of colour and positive thinking, literally festooned with streamers. There’s a giant multicoloured caterpillar, some scaled up pink gums (is that a Claes Oldenburg reference?), naïvely painted portraits and entreaties to be happy daubed on the walls. “Would you like a nipple?” says the artist, handing out stickers of presumably her own (pierced) nipple, to her disconcerted viewers.

Degree shows, eh? Sometimes it’s best to just accept.