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Previews and Reviews | FESTIVAL VISUAL ART
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PREVIEW JAMES LUMSDEN: CHROMATIC VISIONS Emotionally charged, process-based colour paintings THE VODNJAN COLLECTIVE: CROATIA SCOTIA Exchange exploring identity, reminiscence and romanticism ●●●●●
GAME CHANGER Installations subverting ideas of the body beautiful ●●●●●
Edinburgh-based James Lumsden creates paintings and literal landscapes on the canvas, placing 40 or more thin glazes of acrylic paint on top of one another until a mass of what he calls ‘varying chromatic strata’ has been built. The process came to Lumsden in 2007 after years of creating ever- more minimal oil works in a single colour. ‘I felt that I had reached a sort of “monochrome endgame” with the work, paring down and refining to a point where I could take it no further,’ he says. This new method allowed greater opportunity to experiment within a minimal framework.
‘I hope viewers will respond to the painting emotionally, as they would a piece of music,’ says Lumsden. ‘Like music, I’m hoping for some sort of feeling without words. For me the emotional charge often comes from the sometimes unlikely placing or overlaying of different colours . . . I’m using a way of painting, building up in multiple translucent glazes, which is more akin to the processes used by oil painters 500 years ago, yet I’m using modern acrylic paints to continue a contemporary version of this historical process.’ (David Pollock) ■ Scottish Arts Club, 229 8157, until 31 Aug, free.
Scotland and Croatia have a few things in common: new parliaments, similar-sized populations, and landscapes that draw people from all over the world. Both countries also look beyond their borders to the wider world, which is apt considering the artistic impressions Vodnjan – a small, sleepy town on Croatia’s Istrian peninsula – has made on the ten Scottish-based artists exhibiting here. A mishmash of paintings, drawings, sculpture and
everyday objects; at first glance, you’d be forgiven for thinking Istria had been substituted for Knoydart or the Black Isle: lush fields exploding with colour, tacky tea-towels, stacked timber, and ornate rakes that look more like elaborate lecterns. Only the head shawls of passers-by and the sun-drenched garage doors indicate another land.
The work explores identity, reminiscence and romanticism, symbolised by connotations attached to keepsakes, artefacts and transitional odds and ends. Overall, a worthwhile exchange with our new European Union cousins, perhaps best summed up by one of the exhibit’s captions: ‘Of little importance but great consequence’. (Barry Gordon) ■ Doubtfire Gallery, 225 6540, until 31 Aug, free.
On your marks, get set, and go, go, go for this first off-site group show, which forms part of the newly relocated and currently nomadic Collective Gallery’s All Sided games project. In a studio space normally occupied by weight-watchers, four artists play with the idea of the body beautiful and the rhythm of life in a series of installations that quietly subvert the entire notion of exercise regimes. So where Rachel Adams sculpts a pair of foam- covered climbing frames shaped in such a way to render them unusable, Jacob Dahlgren carpets the floor with a network of multi-coloured bathroom scales that resemble a checkered dancefloor. This neatly offsets Haroom Miza’s Sitting in a Chamber, in which handmade vinyl discs bleep in locked- groove synchronicity with the similar-sounding heart machines on a film opposite. Nilbar Gures’ series of staged photographs, Unknown Sports, finds women exploring distinctly non-Olympic events such as leg waxing in a home gym-type space. Game Changer is a parallel universe workout
where rest and play are far more important than busting a gut. (Neil Cooper) ■ Collective: Offsite, Meadowbank Sports Centre, 556 1264, until 1 Sep, free.
ANA MARIA PACHECO: MEMÓRIA ROUBADA Intense and intimate meditation on purging and healing ●●●●●
In a small, dimly lit room, in two ornate cabinets, two sets of disembodied heads sit opposite each other. In one, all eyes face downwards, as if in silent homage to the seven daggers laid out on the floor beneath them. In the other, the heads face out front, a mixture of impassivity, humility and dignity. At first they resemble doll-like trophies, shot down, collected, preserved in aspic and mounted by some ancient hunter. There’s something even deeper going on here, however, that matches the solemnity of the surroundings, and suggests that these heads are survivors of some awful unnamed atrocity. This sense is compounded by the series of seven drawings downstairs, which show figures stripped, blindfolded, tied up and humiliated. Memória Roubada I, Memória Roubada II and Dark Matter are Brazilian artist Ana Maria Pacheco’s near holy response to colonisation, Auschwitz and how power can attempt to crush the will of the people, even as a greater spirit triumphs above it. Images of the Seven Sorrows of Mary, which during the Counter Reformation showed seven swords to represent each sorrow that pierced Mary’s heart, are contemporised in Memória Roubada I in as stark a way as possible. Beneath the heads of Memória Roubada II, part of the last will and testament of Isabella de Castile – expressing her wishes for the inhabitants of the New World – is engraved into a slate base.
Pacheco’s intimate display is deep and intense. It may be shown in silence, but for even more emotional impact, one could imagine a choir accompaniment completing the journey. But perhaps that would be too overwhelming and manipulative in an exhibition that is effectively a meditation on purging and the healing that follows. (Neil Cooper) ■ St Albert’s Catholic Chaplaincy, 650 0900, until 30 Aug, free.
22 Aug–19 Sep 2013 THE LIST 125
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