GSA Degree Show 2009

Degree shows are the most emotionally rife affairs on the art calendar, ripe for extended metaphors all round. If you can get past the queasy feeling that you’re watching a thousand hipsters publicly push out their first born in a bloody performance sans epidural – then the whole affair comes terrifyingly close to a trip to Primark. A headfirst dive into a physically un-consumable pit of art / sequin body-con mini skirts; followed by a series of huffing and puffing attempts to appear more equipped than your fellow viewers / shoppers; concluded 2 ½ hours later by a weary exit, convinced that you, and you alone, have found the best mixed media installation / plimsolls on offer. Sacrilegious but true.
While the high street has its recurring heroes, a certain type of work tends to survive at degree shows as well. And subtlety is rarely it. Humour often comes up trumps in the battle to woo the hungry, tired and caffeine-starved hoards that traipse through; humour and nigh perfect craftsmanship, plus a bit of good luck from the gods of space allocation.
Down a blackened corridor, Simon Gowing’s brilliantly effective neon work, Resign, captures an element of what’s at stake all round: a foreboding sense of the climate these graduates are stepping into and the reactive, adaptive approaches that’ll be necessary for survival. It seems fitting then that Gowing has stepped up to the curatorial plate for Now I Know My ABCs, the third annual Scottish graduates' group exhibition, held at +44 141 Gallery at SWG3 from 17 July.
In the photography camp, Travis Souza’s touching piece, 20 Ruskin Square: Portrait / Archive, meticulously maps out the home of Jean Archibald, whose passing during the completion of the project transforms the book of collected images and email correspondence into a poignant epitaph of a life lived. A similar manipulation of the complicated relation between the universal and personal is drawn out in Harriet Lowther’s humble approach to the monumentality of consumerism in The Big Thank You Project. Dominating an entire wall, in a typically minimalist / conceptual spread, Lowther has presented copies of ‘thank you’ letters shipped out to the producers of everything from Clarins moisturiser to Seven Seas Orange Syrup and Cod Liver Oil.
A deft conceptual subtlety is saved from obscurity by sheer scale in Max Slaven’s expansive work, Piece by Piece. Impeccably executed, scientifically presented photographs of geological specimens from multiple gallery buildings propose a complex stance between artist, viewer and institution. In a simultaneous act of homage and guerilla appropriation Slaven reflects the text and mortar of the art world back at itself, laying terrifyingly bare the literal ideological structures which will so condition the future of this graduating class.
On the way out, Nikolas Kalli’s Catch Me A Fairy video installations provide a fitting allegory for the tentative entry that these artists are about to make onto the proverbial high street and into the real world beyond. Big monitors huddle under tables, sheltering stooped, agitated figures that peer nervously at the feet that pass them by.