Own Art @ Ingleby Gallery
Few city galleries are set against as beautiful a backdrop as Edinburgh's Ingleby Gallery. Tucked behind the sprawl of Waverley Station, Ingleby is a sleek white cube with a view south-eastward to the untamed wilderness of Arthur’s Seat. You couldn’t get a better picture if you brought Sir Edwin Landseer back from the nineteenth century and had him paint it for you. And all those deer roaming around Princes Street would be mayhem.
Ingleby have made the most of this prime location with their Billboard for Edinburgh project. Four times a year, they invite artists to decorate a billboard on the exterior of the gallery. Past commissions have included Ryan Gander, Tacita Dean, Ugo Rondinone and Craig Coulthard, the artist who recently built a full-size football pitch in a forest in the Borders. The ambitious public artwork saw men and women from around the world who now live in Britain play two amateur football matches, entering into the debate over whether Team GB would have a football team in the London Olympics.
The current billboard, by Susan Hiller, has evolved from her Homage to Marcel Duchamp series, in which she explores the phenomenon of ‘aura photographs.’ A technique perfected in the 1970s, the aura photograph is a Polaroid image that brings together a picture of the subject and the reading of a hand sensor that measures their heart rate and electrodermal temperature. Hiller has been an avid collector of these images for years, constructing an extensive typology of coloured light casts, some of which she brings together in a multicoloured composition on the billboard.
As part of the Billboard project, artists also produce the image as a signed limited edition of 50 prints, which you can buy through the gallery, in turn going back into realising the project.
Unusual among privately-owned galleries in that it programmes offsite projects as well as gallery exhibitions, Ingleby is also marked out by showing the work of early career artists as well as established ones. It recently showed the work of ECA graduate Kevin Harman, who famously smashed a metal scaffolding pole through the window of the Collective gallery and presented the video footage for his masters degree show in 2009.
Harman’s show at Ingleby is less controversial, but similarly implicates the viewer, the other works in the gallery space and the street outside the gallery window. Titled When a tree falls, it includes a new sculpture in the form of a double-sided mirror which is framed in hand-carved oak and suspended from the ceiling, visible from the street. A small, single padlock between the two glasses seemingly holds them together whilst simultaneously locking itself into its own reflection. Rarely do you come across a gallery that both works with unpredictable enfant terrible types like Harman and waits on you with glasses of bubbles at previews nights.
Harman’s Big Bang print is still available to buy from the gallery, where there is a wide selection of prints and artist books by a top roster of artists. Ingleby is a peaceful, bright and airy place and you can easily spend whole afternoons choosing and perusing the works on display in the glass vitrines. Current highlights include prints by artist and writer Harland Miller, whose paintings are showing in the gallery until 26 January. At first glance depicting the covers of worn Penguin paperbacks co-opted by vintage shops everywhere, up close the paintings are just as rude and unapologetic as Harman’s work. Dirty Northern Bastard by D. H. Lawrence and This Is Where It’s Fuckin’ At are two such delightful titles. Now don’t say I didn’t warn you.