VISUAL ART | Previews & Reviews
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PRIVATE VIEW STEVEN ANDERSON
The Talbot Rice Gallery celebrated its 40th anniversary in May. To mark the occasion, it launched TRG3, a new project designed to showcase innovative, experimental projects from emerging artists, hosted in the gallery’s iconic Round Room. Scottish painter and performance artist Steven Anderson has been selected as the first artist to participate on the project.
What interested you about TRG3?
TRG3 has a fluid format allowing artists time and resources to develop their work in ways particular to their own methods of working. For me, the project will involve developing my current performance and painting work, based on subjects including mortality and healing. In particular, I’m interested in the transformation of bodies and materials and how they can be loaded with meaning as they move from one state to another. Participants will have access to the university’s collections and academics across departments: how will you make the most of this?
Having that access is an excellent resource within the project. I’m beginning with three lines of research; firstly, I’ve made contact with Dr Graeme Wilson who is leading research on the links between music and health through the Scottish Music and Health Network; I’ve booked a place on two anatomy workshops, which are rarely open to non-medics; and I’m going to spend some time with the 1st-century Gandharan figure sculptures in the university art collection. They seem quite disparate areas of enquiry but come together as extensions of my interest in the performativity surrounding perceptions of fragmented bodies. Can you tell us about the type of work you intend to make as a result of this research?
I’m aiming to create new performance material and a series of paintings. Throughout June I’ll be working on developing a new performance to be shown at the Talbot Rice Gallery during the Edinburgh Art Festival. (Rachael Cloughton)
100 THE LIST 4 Jun–3 Sep 2015
PREVIEW SCULPTURE MARYSIA GACEK: PLEASANT SETTING Glasgow Sculpture Studios, Sat 11 Jul–Sat 5 Sep
On leaving Glasgow School of Art in 2014, artist Marysia Gacek received Glasgow Sculpture Studios’ one-year MFA Graduate Fellowship. The new work on display in Pleasant Setting will reveal the fruits of Gacek’s labour throughout the fellowship, which she has used to further develop her interest in the relationship between visual forms and cultural references. ‘This exhibition will feature a set of paintings on
white muslin curtains which run along the walls and windows of the gallery,’ she says of the display’s unlikely starting point, which provides a suitable bac kdrop for the whole show. ‘Magritte-style trompe l’oeil landscapes and one-to-one renderings will portray what lies directly behind the curtains.’
Gacek will also use GSS’ exhibition space as a platform for further exploring her fascination with the body’s relationship to space and the ways which
artforms can distort that dialogue. ‘Heightening awareness of the body’s traversal of a space, the curtains muffle the potential of architecture,’ she explains. ‘The works propose a simulation that draws one nearer to nature through a process of pointedly obscurantist representation.’ (Rosie Lesso)
REVIEW MIXED MEDIA GARRY FABIAN MILLER: DWELLING Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, until Sat 4 Jul ●●●●●
What’s an artist to do when his core materials are suddenly no longer available? Garry Fabian Miller has built his career making camera-less photographic images using light on Cibachrome paper, but the materials have now been discontinued by their Swiss manufacturer and his stock is due to run out next year. Miller has responded with a two-pronged approach: re-examining the roots of his practice while at the same time pushing out in intriguing new directions.
One result of this has been his collaboration with Dovecot Studios to make two tufted rugs, inspired
by his prints, which form the centrepiece of this exhibition. Shown with classic Miller works around them, they are extraordinary in the way they convey a similar intensity of light, and he hopes now to extend the collaboration to a large-scale tapestry. In the beautifully soft lighting of Dovecot’s exhibition space, his classic abstract images seem to glow as if backlit. But there are no lightboxes here: this is light captured on paper, passed through materials such as oil or water using long exposures to create images which suggest planets and galaxies or, equally, microbes and cells.
The exhibition also brings together Miller’s work with impressionistic paintings by 20th-century artist Winifred Nicholson, whom he considers to be a major influence. While her painterly works appear, on the surface at least, to be very different from the almost clinical sharpness of Miller’s captured light, putting them side-by-side teases out the similarities. Two late semi-abstract works by Nicholson – ‘Consciousness’ and ‘Accord’ – reveal a little-known side to her practice.
The two artists also share an interest in rugs (several belonging to Nicholson are included in the show), which in turn explains why Miller, looking for a new direction, found himself turning to hearth and home, and came to see his own work in a new light. (Susan Mansfield)
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