The quality and range of work at SNGMA was good - textiles, printmaking, sculpture and installations. The press had highlighted Rachel MacLean's new film 'Feed Me', a slick Grimm's fairytale-like satire on the insatiability of consumerism, scripted and played by MacLean in roles from small girl to talent show host to creepy granny. What was disturbing was not so much its blackness as the sense of sleezy, seedy, moral decrepitude. Certainly not child viewing! I thought it was perhaps a little too slick and obvious in its messaging, but hard-hitting, and left a nasty taste in the mouth nonetheless.
Some work I felt was a little bit thin. Daniel Sinsel's abstract watercolours, which, according to the statement were on similar theme of Hansel, gingerbread and consumerist gratification, did not seem to say much. At least Linder's massive tactile many-eyed spiral rug snake 'Diagrams of Love, Marriage of Eyes' was more or less self-explanatory. Margali Reus's work entitled 'Leaves', which featured five large metal 'locks' each about 40cm across protruding from the wall at head height, seemed to be less his gentle description of 'encrypted enigmatic forms' or an 'invitation to unravel, unpick or uncode' than about the intimidating implicit violence of 'big-brother' culture in which information is power. Perhaps that's what happens when you put heavy lumps of metal where viewers might concuss themselves on them... Alexandre da Cunha's woven mops, (Kentucky, 2010), referencing both labour and trade, were quirky, as were Ciara Phillips' large-scale prints created as a result of collaborative workshops. Both these exhibits, and the Andrea Buttner's densely symbolic posters of Kantian philosophy were somewhat lost by being hung in the corridor area. Mikhail Karakis's video 'Children of the Unquiet' involved children in a work interpreting a disused geothermal power station. This piece was well-received critically, but I thought it felt a little scripted. Having studied Russian for years and read Solzhenytsin's work, I was interested in Imogen Stidworthy's video installation inspired by the writer's time in a Soviet labour camp. I particularly struck by the work's aesthetic beauty - seen in a morsel of bread viewed microscopically, and the corresponding poetry in the writer's spoken Russian prose - One-nil to the creative imagination - thank goodness.
There were two highlights that I found both thought-provoking and transformative. The first was Yuri Pattison's film 'The Ideal', exploring the contrast between our perception of 'clean' virtual technology and the poor, dirty, energy-intensive, debris-covered reality of the location in Tibet where the Bitcoin servers are run. There was no didacticism, just a real-time silent film of a few workers going about their daily tasks, mending equipment and their own clothes, tramping about in the dirt and dust. Once you knew the context the work spoke for itself, and movingly.
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| Dodo by Broomberg & Chanarin |
Broomberg and Chanarin's 2014 installation 'Dodo', was a multi-sensorial experience. The artists place it very much in their usual context of conflict and paradox; according to them it is 'about' the destruction of a pristine coastline at San Carlos in Mexico as a result of the 1970 filming of 'Catch-22'. The film showing on a huge screen, accompanied by the quiet swish and shadows of an aeroplane propeller, and fragmented artefacts from a disinterred B-25 bomber, was created from previously unseen off-cuts of the 1970 film. The overwhelming impression for me was not of devastation but one of calm, and of the inexorable ability of nature to heal itself. I'm not sure that was the intention, but the strong emotional response evoked by the work made it one of the exhibition highlights for me.
There was time for a quick visit to the Talbot Rice Gallery, but there was nothing quite comparable there. On the way back to the station we had time to look in on the RSA New Contemporaries, the outputs of final year students selected from the top 5 Scottish art schools. There was quite a range of quality and maturity there, and quite a few pieces where concept and execution didn't quite match up. Highlights for me were works were Corey Reid's prints and Iona Roberts strong oil paintings.
So, a good full day out, and good coffee at the SNGMA!
