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VisualArt
PREVIEW GROUP SHOW 21 REVOLUTIONS: TWO DECADES OF CHANGING MINDS AT GLASGOW WOMEN’S LIBRARY Intermedia Gallery, CCA, Glasgow, Fri 21 Sep-Sat 13 Oct
Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) has grown from a grassroots project launched in 1991 in a small shopfront in Garnethill into an accredited museum and a hub for women’s and equalities information in Scotland. The exhibition 21 Revolutions celebrates a coming of age: 21 women artists have each made an edition of 20 fine art prints using the collections as inspiration. Co-founder of GWL, Dr Adele Patrick, who is now the Library’s
Lifelong Learning and Creative Development Manager says: ‘The exhibition is a celebration of this growth, of us surviving difficult times and our current health and vigour.’ They have been astonished by the artists who have agreed to participate. ‘We have amongst the cohort the godmother of Scottish contemporary art, Sam Ainsley, two Turner Prize nominees and two women who have represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale.’
Ashley Cook drew inspiration from a pack of Panko playing cards, a game invented by the suffragettes to raise their own funds and awareness of the cause. Claire Barclay has used the suffragette and temperance motto ‘Wear the White Flower of the Blameless Life’. Kate Davis’s tribute to Jo Spence draws on her autobiography, Putting Myself in the Picture. Emerging talent Delphine Dallison has made work based on the hundreds of campaigning badges in the Library’s archive. Other artists include Karla Black, Jacki Parry, Helen de Main, Sharon Thomas and Corin Sworn.
Of GWL’s achievements Patrick says: ‘It wouldn’t have happened if thousands of women and some significant male supporters hadn’t invested time, energy and donations.’ With age and experience the organisation has become more welcoming and more accessible to all rather than become a stale, over bureaucratic or institutionalised space. ‘We have kept the best of our “special ingredients” a warm welcome to all and a steady stream of home baking, whilst creating a significant specialised library, learning and archive resource for international researchers and local literacy learners alike.’ (Talitha Kotzé)
REVIEW FILM FIGURE STUDIES Summerhall, Edinburgh, until Thu 27 Sep ●●●●●
There’s something heroic about David Michalek’s three-screen sequel of sorts to his similarly-styled ‘Slow Dancing’ triptych of larger-than-life slo-mo studies of dancers in motion, first seen in 2007. Where in that piece five blink-and-you’ll-miss-em seconds were stretched out to ten minutes of extended play performed by professionals, the cho- reography applied here is to a more diverse array of long, short, tall and less whippet-like physiques. Seen largely naked, acting out routines of every-
day movement, Michalek’s subjects – a woman with a double mastectomy, a bearded old man shifting bags of cement in his Y-fronts – become monu- mental pin-ups striking a pose, as every sinew and twitch is accentuated and buffed into shape.
As a conscious form of homage to and reinven- tion of cinematic and photographic techniques pio- neered in the 19th century by Eadweard Muybridge, Michalek’s film may look as glossy as a coffee-table magazine spread made flesh. As each figure blurs into the next, however, there’s a strength beyond the seductively hypnotic display, as imperfection blurs into beauty en route. (Neil Cooper)
REVIEW FILM & ARCHITECTURE THE INVISIBLE COLLEGE & CHURCHES IN THE MODERN WORLD Lighthouse, Glasgow, until Wed 17 Oct ●●●●● REVIEW INSTALLATION ALISTAIR FROST: IMAGE COMING SOON Mary Mary, Glasgow, until Sat 20 Oct ●●●●●
A dual exhibition which reflects the Catholic church’s process of aggiornamento (‘updating’) in the latter half of the 20th century, the two displays here examine the architecture of a new breed of modernist postwar place of worship in very different ways. In the case of Churches in the Modern World, the method is to examine some of these buildings from Kensington to Kelvinside through an innovative dis- play of photographs, plans and information printed on interlinked slabs of cardboard.
Alongside this sits Scots public art group NVA’s radical printed masterplan for the redevelopment of Gillespie, Kidd and Coia’s St Peter’s Seminary, the now-derelict priest training college in Cardross which is often cited as perhaps Scotland’s finest modernist building. Both displays are informative and well-presented, with the juxtaposition of Murray Grigor’s 1972 and 2009 silent documentaries on St Peter’s proving to be a powerfully essential meditation on the erosion of the physical and spiritual. (David Pollock)
There is a leisure agenda here, activities actively postponed: ‘image coming soon’. The process of contemplation – thinking, planning, daydreaming, future presence – manifests in hammocks turned canvases. Interludes of motivational music dis- rupt the feeling of ‘sleepy zonked out sleepiness’. Abruptly the music stops just before one can con- sider rolling out of the hanging bed.
London-based Alistair Frost decorates with popu- lar iconography while referencing the act of painting – deferring action, image and meaning. Stripes are a signature stroke and blocks of these become like flags: holding images for events, or even countries. Graffiti posters (with the striped heads of exotic zebras) reference grimy palimpsest walls layered with flyering in hot European cities. The theme of laziness is fitting. The artist dabbles with images that hint to summer days and a slower pace of life. Yet the exhibition leaves one uninspired, with a sense of dissatisfaction which suggests that complete relaxation is always out of reach as ham- mocks are turned from useful objects into objets d’arts. (Talitha Kotze)
20 Sep–18 Oct 2012 THE LIST 113