Hilary Lloyd @ Tramway

Standing, for what seems like an eternity, before the static quietude of Lloyd’s video stills of classical sculpture, there occurs a dawning realisation. The dark recesses of the gargoyle’s eye sockets seem oddly familiar, so too those lustrously lit folds of flesh on the male bust’s torso in Sculpture (2009).The dead giveaway is the dark lacquered wood that lines the walls – moody and foreboding – offset by a diagonal slash of white sunlight spearing the frame of the projection on the right.

These casts, the subject of Lloyd’s work, now reside in the halls of the Glasgow School of Art and are keenly scrutinised by many a student in a life drawing context. Lloyd’s films reconstruct the act of looking and allude to but never introduce narratives surrounding the mis-en-scene. Her viewing tends to the impassive, repressing curiosity in favour of an enduring view through a camera lens, a facet of her practice described as ‘anti portraiture’.

Composition, rather than figuration, takes precedence in all three films. A stark diagonal reappears in the projection facing the viewer upon entry. Featuring the corner of a building, the shot shifts between two slightly varying angles. The clean edges and linear simplicity of this image presides over the other two pieces with an impervious air of disquiet. And however beautiful her white ornamentation and fan shaped head piece might be, the female bust’s glassy-eyed blind gaze is clearly intended to mirror the viewer’s own ‘looking but not seeing’ experience. [Amy Birchard]