Ellie Harrison’s Dark Days offered participants the unique opportunity to stay overnight at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Glasgow. Web developer Neil Scott was lucky enough to be one such participant and shares his experience of the night below.

image by James Rippingale

What would happen if a cataclysmic event forced one hundred strangers to spend the night in a public building?

This was the scenario informing Ellie Harrison’s participatory art project, Dark Days, which took place in Glasgow’s GoMA on Friday 13 February 2015.

The rules were strict – there was to be no drugs or alcohol, no cooking, no pyjamas, no leaving the gallery after doors closed at 6.30pm, and lights would go off at 3am. Before that the participants would be trained in consensus based decision making in order to come up with a plan about how they could spend the rest of the night.

Now, my opinion of human nature – informed by the nightly news and an interest in dystopian science fiction – is that we will descend into a violent, power-crazed mob in a trice. I doubt we can ever settle into peaceful non-hierarchical communities without massive restrictions on personal freedom. However, I was pleasantly surprised that all the participants I met during the various icebreaking exercises seemed unbelievably genial. Maybe, I thought, utopia is possible. Even the consensus based decision making (unfairly characterised by people waving jazz hands when they agree with something) seemed to produce workable solutions.

image by James Rippingale

image by Neil Scott

The only downside was that it just wouldn’t stop. The talking in groups and in spokescouncils went on for a surreal length of time. People seemed to be quite happy to keep mumbling about stuff forever. As someone who doesn’t have great hearing, especially with the hard floors and the high ceilings of echoey old GoMA, it was incredibly alienating.

They say introverts have their energy sapped by being with people whereas extroverts become more energetic. As the evening wore on, it became clear who were the extroverts – their charisma turning them into natural leaders. And, to be honest, I don’t think anybody minded. They just wanted to take all the thwarted energy and do something.

The decision we made was to split into fluid groups doing different activities such as playing games, den-building, talking about Dark Days, and writing a manifesto. Thanks to Laurie, one of the aforementioned natural leaders, we also sprinted down the hall in order to feel the breeze on our faces and took part in crowdsurfing. It was all great fun – like a big party but one where the lack of alcohol and the presence of an authority figure (ie Glasgow Life) meant it had the joy and freedom of childhood.

images by James Rippingale

Nevertheless, by the end of the night the groups gradually moved into factions, with the hedonists and the serious ones diverging. It’s fascinating to speculate how this contradiction would have been resolved had the experiment continued another day. After a luminous night, it may well have been a dark day.

image by Ellie Harrison

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Dark Days is an event by artist Ellie Harrison offering participants a unique opportunity to stay the night in Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art.

Taking place from 13 – 14 February, Dark Days aims to hint towards a time in the future when our large municipal buildings may need to be re-imagined / re-used for alternative purposes.

The event coincides with the gallery’s participation in Harrison’s Early Warning Signs project.

Book your space at Dark Days here.

Read about Ellie’s previous Scottish Independence Referendum exhibition at Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh here.

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

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After the Revolution, Who Will Clean Up the Mess? is a work created by Glasgow based artist Ellie Harrison for the Counterpoint exhibition at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery. Since 1 August, four large confetti canons have sat at the ready in the gallery, awaiting the outcome of the Referendum. In the early hours of 19 September, in the event of a yes vote, the confetti canons will detonate in the presence of revellers at the Referendum Results Party and those watching the live webcast online. A no vote will result in the canons remaining dormant until the end of the exhibition on 18 October.

After the Revolution, Who Will Clean Up the Mess? aims to question the possibilities and consequences of radical political change. To hear more from Ellie, watch this interview about the project:

Ellie Harrison – After the Revolution, Who Will Clean Up the Mess? via arts-news

After the Revolution, Who Will Clean Up the Mess? runs at the Talbot Rice Gallery in Edinburgh until 18 October with a live event from 23:00 on 18 September. Find out more here.

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Find more events in our weekly bulletin here.

Every Friday lunchtime in 2012 artists, friends and flatmates Ellie Harrison & Oliver Braid are joining forces to co-host a regular half-an-hour slot on Culture Lab Radio.

Broadcast LIVE from their lounge in the West End of Glasgow, the Ellie & Oliver Show aims to explore the philosophies that surround and inform their everyday lives and is set to an eclectic soundtrack that reflects their unique weekly topic: universal themes such as ‘identities’, ‘obsessions’ or ‘routines’.

An audience friendly, upbeat inquiry into contemporary living, the Ellie & Oliver Show offers a rare insight into the day-to-day lives of two of the freshest and more unusual new voices on the Scottish art scene.

Already being hailed as the perfect antidote to a sometimes over serious and insincere art world, the Ellie & Oliver Show emphasises honesty and optimism as its co-hosts use their close friendship to help each other negotiate their individual, and sometimes idiosyncratic, ways in the world. Unfazed by embarrassment, Ellie Harrison & Oliver Braid continue to welcome this weekly interlude from their hectic work routines as an opportunity to ‘catch up’ LIVE on air – offering personal and provocative interpretations of their theme, which seem to strike-a-chord with likeminded listeners, both locally and across the globe.

Ellie Harrison & Oliver Braid were invited by Culture Lab Radio to develop this new show – their first major collaboration – following their highly successful hour-long pilot broadcast as part of Wunderbar Festival in Newcastle in November 2011. Now, only nine episodes in, they are already developing a cult following. Curious fans tune-in LIVE during their Friday lunch break in anticipation of the latest topic of discussion, whilst others listen again or on- the-go, as the handy iTunes podcast and Mixcloud online archive mean that you need never miss a thing. You too can keep up-to-date with the unfolding weekly adventures of Ellie & Oliver – as they chase love, success and harmony across the airwaves and beyond.

Live from Glasgooow, it’s the Ellie & Oliver Shooow!

Visit the Ellie & Oliver Show website
Hear some of the shows you may have missed
Follow the Ellie & Oliver Show on Twitter
Like the Ellie & Oliver Show on Facebook

Here’s a taste of the Ellie & Oliver Show right here:

Ellie & Oliver Show jingles were written and produced by Glasgow-based musician Shortlegs, with logo design by Glasgow-based illustrator (and Central Station member) Emily Chappell.

‘Market Forces’, Ellie Harrison, installation view. Photo: Colin Davison

Ellie Harrison’s solo exhibition ‘Market Forces’ is currently on at Vane, Newcastle from 1st November – 17th December 2011. Intro text by Laurie Penny can be read here. A film of the launch night can be viewed below:

Ellie Harrison is an artist who looks at the numbers. As artist in residence at Wunderbar, her solo exhibition at Vane and collaborative projects during the festival tread the line between the sublime and the ridiculous, between creation and activism. It’s all intended to get visitors to understand how our world is shaped by everyday engagements with the micro-detail of a macro-financial system that is steering humanity over a cliff of crisis – with a healthy dose of self-irony.

‘Market Forces’, Ellie Harrison, installation view. Photo: Colin Davison

Vane Contemporary Art Ltd
39 Pilgrim Street
Newcastle upon Tyne

www.vane.org.uk

1. Mad Hatter by Igault

2. Toytown by ellieharrison

3. worry dolls by joannasusskind

4. Brushie brushie brushie by KittWalker

5. bored by johnbryden

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See more of our Top 5 selections here.

Preview:
Glue Factory, Friday 11 June, 5–7pm
CCA, 7–10pm

Exhibition Runs from Saturday 12 – Saturday 26 June
This year’s MFA is sited in The Glue Factory*. Used earlier this year for Glasgow International, the space provides a much less uniform space than the awesome, hangar like Tramway, with odd quirky rooms and warren-like staircases. Today, after weeks of sunshine, Glasgow is buckling under an intense rainstorm, and The Glue Factory resembles a bit of a leaky ship. This is a familiar Weegie set-up then - unsuspecting, post-industrial, grimecore warehouse plays shelter to conceptual work, which in turn pays site-specific homage.

It’s possible to identify two broad (and very generalised) strands present at the show. One is the site specific, post-industrial kind mentioned above, the other a more detached practice which relates to contemporary phenomena – chiefly data and the internet.

In the post-industrial, site-specific camp are artists like Sarah Forest, and Olga Schulz, who has installed an interestingly minimal sculptural shelter based on a peeling poster.

Tom Harrup has taken all the heavy-duty rawness almost full circle. His light installations take apart and celebrate machinery – everything is recycled, junk-yard-sourced and unfinished – yet in the darkened space these are two of the most hypnotic and graceful interventions you’ll encounter. Rings of light ebb and float mid-air, a theatre iris breathes a pattern against a dull brick wall.

Perhaps Tom is the conceptual bridge to the other camp of artists who deconstruct the technical and the digital. Ellie Harrison needs no prior introduction to Central Station members, and her works often have an online presence. She shows her witty General Election Drinking Game in it’s entirity here. Emily Donnini has made a slick piece which re-presents top google-searches of various countries as stop-frame animations back-projected onto floated glossy perspex screens.

Maybe the most intriguing graduate is Oliver Braid. Braid has presented a framed drawing – six pencil portraits in a detailed but slightly schoolboy style. Five of the portraits are of male graduating BA artists whom Braid considers to be the ‘hottest’ in the year. The images are culled from their Facebook profiles. The 6th image is a distorted reimagining of the artist as a sort of Facebook Zombie. A tangled off-white sculpture made from glue sits atop the frame – “the content of his gluepot”, Graham Ramsay, one of the MFA tutors explains.

How do I begin to unravel Post-Relational Aesthetic Onanism via Social Networking? Do I even want to? Seeing as we’re exploring the medium here, I have, in the interests of thorough research, befriended Oliver Braid on Facebook*, and will attempt to get him onto this very platform, and perhaps he can have the last word. Who knows, he may already be lurking as I write. In the meantime, here’s a Quentin Crisp quote from his artist’s statement:

“People who have learned to sing will always have richer, rounder voices. People who’ve learned to dance will always have bigger, bolder movements, but as for pottery and basket-weaving, what good are they? The moment the doors of the evening institute clang shut behind you you are back where you started. On the way home you might get into an argument with a stranger at a bus stop. It’s no good saying I can’t express myself you’ll have to come and see my baskets.” Quentin Crisp, 1980

*UPDATE. Friend request accepted.

Thanks to Graham Ramsay, MFA Tutor, for the tour, and to Kirsty Barr for organising.