This Month in Scottish Art September brings new exhibitions in Dundee, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, as well as events from artist Coco Fusco and renowned filmmaker-theorist Laura Mulvey Words: Adam Benmakhlouf Jac Leirner
Jac Leirner
The Fruitmarket Gallery
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120 lengths of cord have been mounted on the wall of Fruitmarket. There’s a pink piece woven with cobalt blue, a thicker black length, a nondescript beige, a zingy lime green with black speckles. The more you look, the more details emerge. 120 Cords (2014) is created by an artist with an eye for the peculiar within the everyday. The exhibit is part of Add it Up, Brazilian artist Jac Leirner’s latest show at Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery. The exhibition marks Leirner’s first solo show in Scotland, although she is returning to the gallery, having exhibited works as part of Possibilities of the Object: Experiments in Modern and Contemporary Brazilian Art back in 2015. Throughout the exhibition, order, repetition and obsession pervade. A series of technical colour studies, for instance, meticulously document the interactions between hues, saturations and values. They recall Paul Klee and Josef Albers’
abstractions and similarly use grids to create rhythmic studies. Elsewhere, these same themes are addressed via the objects themselves: in The End, Skin (1992) and Pulmao (1987) the paraphernalia of an addicted smoker takes centre-stage. Leirner preserves roaches, Rizla papers, butts and cellophane wrappers. Skin is particularly memorable. Here, Leirner sticks Rizla papers in a grid formation. The delicate white papers bristle as you pass, and in the accompanying video, Leirner describes the piece as ‘if the wall had skin’. Leirner is at her best when between her minimalist roots and something more personal. Her recent work The Reinforcer (2016), straddles this masterfully. The exhibit, constructed of brown, pale mint and grey scraps of Rizla packets has a patient command of colour reminiscent of minimalist painter Agnes Martin. The piece is, however, invested with an intimate twist: the scraps were collected over many years and so each is tied to a place, a time and a memory. [Figgy Guyver] Jac Leirner, Add it Up at Fruitmarket Gallery until 22 Oct
Laura Aldridge
Plant Scenery of the World Inverleith House
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Taking its name from a suite of paintings by 19th Century artist-botanist RK Grenville, Plant Scenery of the World in the long-languishing Inverleith House ushers in new energy (and audiences) with an ambitious series of works which could, finally, unite the space’s twin interests of contemporary art and botanical science. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Gardens’ iconic modernist Front Range Glasshouses, the galleries are designed to mimic the climatic variances of the hot houses, each representing a psychic micro climate and showcasing the work of a single artist. Charlie Billingham has taken inspiration from both the architecture of the space and the surrounding gardens, filling the first room with boldly painted pots, a dividing screen, wallpaper based on coy and lily pads. Past a triptych of vast contemporary watercolours of the Gardens’ giant stinking ‘corpse flower’, we come to Laura Aldridge’s immersive, beautiful, multi-sensory installation. Shoes must be removed to avoid damaging the delicate cotton prints on the floor made from samples in the glasshouses using natural means – rust, soy and vinegar reacting with plant material to extract natural dyes. On top of these ghostly
September 2017
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he month begins with the Glasgow School of Art’s Graduate Degree Show. From across the postgraduate roster, newly graduated students present their final show from Research, Design and Fine Art across the Tontine and Reid Buildings. After the opening on 1 Sep, the show continues from 2-9 Sep. From 1-17 Sep at CCA, artist Tako Taal presents Compound in the Intermedia space. The two new videos presented in the show examine ‘figures of the stranger and an extended family,’ with one shot at The Gambia Tourism Hospitality Institute, along with documents from a family archive, print and objects. The exhibition borrows its form from a common living arrangement in West Africa. Throughout the month, there is Czech Season in Scotland, with two photo exhibitions across Glasgow venues 16 Nicholson Street and Street Level Photoworks, both showcasing Prague-based photography. Also this week, after a much needed soujourn and postponement, Transmission return from a summer break with the annual Members’ Show. Membership is open to all, and the work dropoff is from 4 Sep, then opening 9 Sep. As the second show of its brand new gallery space, Peacock Arts in Aberdeen have invited artists Michele Horrigan and Sean Lynch to mount their exhibition Ignore the Management, opening Fri 8 Sep and continuing until 21 Oct. With a focus on their native Ireland, their activities find and develop models that challenge the societal measures and institutional values that aim to manage and orient human behaviour in our increasingly technocratic world. From 15 Sep, Embassy presents its graduate show with four artists selected from across the Scottish degree shows. The exhibition continues until 8 Oct. In Glasgow School of Art’s corridor space on Garnethill, they have assembled a series of printed
plant forms lie a series of multi-coloured glass eyes based on nazars, the anti-evil eye charms so ubiquitous in the eastern Mediterranean. The colours correspond to different emotions – pink for love, green for happiness – and the forms allude to protection, superstition, the gaze. Upstairs, Bobby Niven has created bronze casts of plant samples from the Botanics’ Herbarium. Combined and transformed into Paolozzi-esque constructions, each is displayed upon a carved wooden hand jutting into the room, proffering the work to the viewer. Ben Rivers’ video work Urth fills the final room, presenting a dystopic narrative of a research scientist documenting her last days in a hermetically sealed biodome postenvironmental catastrophe. Poetic work exploring a climatic apocalypse melding science and art – surely what this space was made for. The accompanying literature describes the glasshouses as the meeting point of culture and nature, a sly nod to the sustainable future of Inverleith House as evidenced by this exhibition. With this style of energised, labour-intensive curation and artistic-scientific collaboration the building offers a platform for cutting edge contemporary art which also engages the broader audiences of the surrounding gardens. [Rosamund West] Plant Scenery of the World, Inverleith House until 29 Oct
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textile works from their archive of patterns printed in the School’s Centre for Advanced Textiles. Titled Pioneers of Post-War Pattern, they focus on the output of mid-20th century female designers and GSA alumni Sylvia Chalmers, Dorothy Smith and Margaret Stewart, making an eclectic mix of vibrant colours and abstract patterns. See elsewhere in this issue for an interview with Sahej Rahal at CCA about his exhibition opening on 16 Sep then continuing until 29 Oct. In Dundee, artist Kelly Richardson’s exhibition The Weather Makers opens at DCA from 23 Sep-26 Nov. Richardson imagines the cataclysmic end of global environmental strains in a series for large scale CGI animations. In Dundee again, from 29 Sep, Cooper Gallery present a programme of screenings surrounding the film work and writings of renowned theorist Laura Mulvey and collaborator Peter Wollen. Over two weeks, their experimental videos will be shown over a series of evening and weekend events. On 29 Sep, Mulvey will open the programme with a talk at 7pm. In Tramway from 2 Sep, new exhibitions come from artists Stuart Middleton and Luiz Roque. For his largest solo exhibition, Middleton shows a new video of an undernourished dog prowling a white vivisection laboratory. Meanwhile Roque’s European premiere of HEAVEN, which speculates a version of 2080 in which a new virus affects mainly the trans population. Within this landscape, Roque sets a story of love under pressure. At the end of the month, Tramway host an evening event by Coco Fusco. On 28 Sep, the artist will present her performative lecture Ethology: Primate Visions of the Human Mind, in which she revives and embodies the chimpanzee animal psychologist Dr. Zira from the original Planet of the Apes films of the late 1960s and early 1970s to deliver an intelligent and satirical filmed performance work.
Kelly Richardson, Mariner 9, 2012. 3-channel HD video installation with audio.
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