Hot Rocks

This group show is a great insight into current artistic practices over a broad range of backgrounds

Article by Morag Keil | 12 Mar 2007

Hot Rocks is the first exhibition at Transmission in 2007. It brings
together seven international artists (Monika Grzymala, Andreas Hofer, Brian
Jungen, Robert Long, Dorit Margreiter, Scott Myles and Rosha Yaghmai) to
celebrate and join their disparate practices.

These artists have two things in common. Firstly, each of them is
reacting to and working in the present time, and secondly, they are all exhibiting in the same space. Monika Grzymala alters the gallery using spatial drawings which affect the exhibition area, therefore altering the way we view the other works. Her sculptures guide you in, out and around parts of
the gallery, creating walls where there are none and leading the eye.

There is a clear separation in these artists between works made on a large scale and presented as framed aesthetic objects, and the works that respond to consumer culture by using ephemera and presenting it in a 'lo-fi' fashion.

Despite the differences in the appearance of these works, the end result tackles the same issues of capitalism and the destruction that consumer culture can cause. The exhibition on a whole is very monotone: the black and white creates a visual framework to join the exhibits together. This also sets the mood for a bleak vision of the future, which is represented clearly in Robert Longo's charcoal drawings of apocalyptic visions, borrowed from the mass media.

This group show is a great insight into current artistic practices over a
broad range of backgrounds. It illustrates how the vast amount of choice
and visual information in the current century can create a variety of
responses, but that each seems to carry similar messages.

Transmission Gallery, Glasgow. This exhibition has now closed.