VISUAL ART | PREVIEWS & REVIEWS
GAMING HISTORY VIDEOGAMES: DESIGN / PLAY / DISRUPT V&A Dundee, until Sun 8 Sep ●●●●●
This new display in V&A Dundee’s large and atmospheric temporary display galleries offers a fresh and detailed view of the videogame industry and culture surrounding it. We open with a beautiful, scene-setting quote from Frank Lantz, director of the New York University Game Center: ‘Making games combines everything that’s hard about building a bridge with everything that’s hard about composing an opera. Games are operas made out of bridges.’
The first and largest element of Videogames: Design / Play / Disrupt is an in-depth study of eight ground-breaking games, each broken down into individual design processes. Audiences are shown the ‘emotional mood boards’ for the multiplayer online Journey, which are used to influence responses to every scene; we see the breadth of character designs, set paintings and motion- capture movement creation which informed the cinematic scope of The Last of Us; there are the elements of city planning and fashion design which Splatoon incorporates, and the very different literature roots which feed into the aesthetic and dialogue of Kentucky Route Zero and No Man’s Sky.
Also featuring Bloodborne, Consume Me and The Graveyard (whose creators Tale of Tales produced a ‘Realtime Art Manifesto’ in 2006, recreated here), the show is packed with detail in the form of notebooks, development art and concept visualisations. It’s a fun introduction to the mass of design and development work the industry’s creators undertake. The show also reflects on the political implications of the games industry. Through film and text, it looks at weighty subjects such as violence, sex, representation, the treatment of women, and the slow shift of the industry away from white, western ideals, before lighter sections include films on gaming communities and a mock-up DIY arcade featuring playable versions of some eccentric contemporary designs. (David Pollock)
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DRAWING MARK MAKING: PERSPECTIVES ON DRAWING Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, until Sun 20 Oct ●●●●●
Six artists, buddied up into duos across three rooms, draw here from their very singular world-views. Yet somehow you can find a through-line running across them all.
Erica Eyres and Jonathan Owen draw from found images, Eyres copying from photographs in 1970s naturist magazines, Owen’s ‘eraser drawings’ rubbing out movie stars from classic film scenes, so all that is left is the background. Where Owen’s images are existentially bereft, with Eyres, the joy comes, not through sex, but the everyday mundanity of chilling in the pool or barbecues in the sun. The coloured line drawings of bodies in motion by France-Lise McGurn bend, stretch and dance their way through the frame with a classicist retro air. In contrast, Lois Green’s postcard-sized black and white still lives peer surreptitiously into unoccupied rooms. Only in two pieces is that gaze returned, peering out onto trees or a river at dusk.
Gregor Wright’s digital drawings on large flat-screen TVs are dreamy collages of pink-hued worlds,while Ross Hamilton Frew’s opaque amalgams of words and images are reimagined from second-hand books, with evocative Zen-noir narratives. (Neil Cooper)
126 THE LIST 1 Jun–31 Aug 2019
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PAINTING VICTORIA CROWE: 50 YEARS OF PAINTING City Art Centre, Edinburgh, until Sun 13 Oct
Victoria Crowe’s work doesn’t shout: it doesn’t have to. She may have become one of Scotland’s most important artists with very little fanfare, but this is all set to change this summer when she is the subject of a major retrospective at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre.
Over three floors, and including more than 150
paintings and drawings, the exhibition is a rare opportunity to see a spectrum of Crowe’s work from her 50-year career, and to celebrate her rigorous skills and probing vision. Her best known work is still ‘A Shepherd’s Life’ (shown at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in 2000), a portrait of her neighbour, Borders shepherd Jenny Armstrong, whom she met after moving to Scotland in 1968. But this is only one strand in a wide-ranging oeuvre.
The former Edinburgh College of Art teacher’s work has been compared to poetry in the way it weaves together images and ideas, and consistently asks the deep questions of life. Fusing elements of portraiture, landscape and still life, she pursues philosophical ideas rigorously. Continuing to explore new ways of working, her recent projects have included a film of her paintings to work in parallel with a live performance of Schubert’s ‘Winterreisse’. (Susan Mansfield)
PRINT THOMAS KILPPER: THE POLITICS OF HERITAGE VS. THE HERITAGE OF POLITICS Edinburgh Printmakers, until Sat 13 Jul ●●●●●
This show by German artist-activist Thomas Kilpper is the inaugural exhibition in Edinburgh Printmakers’ new home, a former rubber factory which later became a brewery. As the show’s title suggests, Kilpper embraces the social-political and artistic history of the venue, marking out its contradictions as he goes. He does this via a monumental site- specific rogues’ gallery that fills floor and ceiling with a partisan topography of past, present and possible futures, with mirror images of a carved-up cast list of pop / art stars that would put Peter Blake’s gathering for Sergeant Pepper in the psychedelic shade.
Over 36 images, resembling a woodcut of a trade union banner writ large, Kilpper juxtaposes factory workers with art figures such as Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol. John Lydon and Jeremy Corbyn are there, as are artists Jim Lamble and Alasdair Gray. Rats sit aloft the shoulders of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. A wobbly Theresa May totters next to Kate Moss, while local boy Sean Connery, captured in his artists’ model days, shows exactly why he’s called ‘Big’ Tam. As a statement – of intent as much as reflection – Kilpper celebrates how worlds can be turned upside down. (Neil Cooper)