This exhibition is a sequence of journeys: points of departure and arrival, presence and absence. The work on display is an exhibition of clusters and parallels, of architectural and spatial details examined: shapes, lines and curves, inside and outside, ‘choreographically’ reported on. It takes account of an observational – in situ – process that seeks to find the essence of its subject: a building, its layers, its sonic vocabulary, and its materials. In combination the building’s surfaces and flow, the movement of people through the space, sound interrupting or contaminating space, voices transported around the building – folding spaces and acoustics. It makes use of the changing environments from entrance to basement to external balcony and conjoining spaces like stairwells, raised platforms and sunken dance floors. It seeks to investigate the data that images – of any kind – transmit (architectural blueprint, sketch, photograph, illustration, medical diagram). It looks at the purposeful uses of the information images hold: subtle evocation, spatial illusion or exacting measurement. And what the viewer ‘draws’ from that information: from precision to emotion. The exhibition is a conscious arrangement – though once that finds an affinity with the improvisational – that suggests a heightened awareness of time spent in a building. An acute vigilance of being alone within a place and letting its multiple synchronised or discordant narratives unfold. The subject of the exhibition isn’t the Pavilion itself but rather the artist’s place within it. The artist’s pursuit has been to find the building as a collaborator, forming or articulating its own language at the end of an ongoing visual conversation.

Drawing by Ally Wallace

Ally Wallace works with installation, drawing, painting, sculpture, video and animation in direct response to specific sites, buildings or locations: an architect’s office, science laboratory, or here a seaside Pavilion, dance hall, leisure facility and social hub. He employs these non-gallery spaces to host self-initiated residences and in turn the exhibition of a close scrutiny, the inspection of their subject, materials and purpose.

This exhibition describes the habits of a journey, its lengths and changes from a studio in the East End, to Glasgow Central to Rothesay, Isle of Bute, on road and rail, and then across water, then returning and repeating. This conjoining of pace, time, surface and movement is embedded in the exhibition: lining up the abstract and the figurative, then an absence of figures, then passages of slowness and stillness, then moments of illusion, details close-up and far, the building’s brief and long narratives, its temperature. Held within the exhibition’s entirety is an invite to contemplate, and to relive the memory of the building’s experiences, alongside a mirroring or recollection of the occupying time of Wallace’s experience as its artist-in-residence.

Seaside Modernity Installation view by Ally Wallace

Seaside Modernity Installation view by Ally Wallace

The exhibition’s installation stages an intuitive response, in successive and joining passages, like a poem, diary or home movie. Colour and shapes, small details in pencil, or broader washes appear in interruption and intrusion; displays appear visible and then become invisible. Parts of heating systems, curved plastic warped or melted window panes, doorways or projector screens and decorative velvet rope stands are recruited into the project as rests, tables, frames and props. A lectern for the Society of the Women Citizens of the Isle of Bute becomes an appropriated object, a host for an exhibition text. Close by are marine and military images, reminders of the building’s origins from 1938 and evidence of its slow water sea air rot, its decline – its inherent vice – of the mischief of entropy, flaking, peeling, cracking, falling.

Sketches by Ally Wallace

 Sketches by Ally Wallace

Wallace’s marks and observational processes bring to mind the paintings of Raoul de Keyser, the Belgian artist who died in 2012, and in particular to works like Come on, play it again, nr. 7, 2001, 3 Hoeken III, 1971 and VISP, 1968. Their painted gestures are a description of the lines, decorations, details, hues, colours and surfaces of everyday life. This behaviour that Wallace and de Keyser share finds character in projection screen suspensions, the bringing together of overlapping or exaggerated lines, the highlighting of prominent curvatures, the illumination of small details, the extraction of curiosity and curious features. And in the short-lived exhibition in the Pavilion the line of detail and accuracy flowing from solidity to abstraction, evidence of time spent, of a conscious flow of lived experiences: alert then slow, monotonous, then enthused and sharp and repeated.

These processes and works further bring to mind the work of Toby Paterson, and in particular his installation Ever Growing, Never Old, at The Modern Institute, Glasgow, 2009, and the sculptural works and images Asymmetric Snowflake, 2007 and Inchoate Landscapes, 2011. The isolated object, rendered in detail and in spatial illusion while purposefully engaging with an object’s intention finds resonance with the paintings of Julie Roberts, for example Gynaecology Couch, 2011. The sonic spatial portraits, that are part installation, drawing and sculpture are similar to the works of Trisha Donnelly, in particular her show at Modern Art, Oxford, 2007. While in moving image the Berlin-based experimental works in 16mm film bring to mind Ute Aurand especially In Die Erde Gebait (Building under the Ground), 2008.

Seaside Modernity detail by Ally Wallace

Casts by Ally Wallace

The building, designed by James Carrick of Ayr and opened in 1938, commencing a new process of restoration is referenced slightly in Wallace’s installation. The Pavilion’s Modernism and relationship to Scottish architectural history and its idiosyncratic placement in the seaside town of Rothesay are further postscripts to Wallace’s residency. These are the silhouette lines that the building is able to articulate anyway. It was designed to give the effect of sunrise, a pleasure building, a destination for Glasgow’s holidaymakers in the International Modernist style. What the artist does is give voice to its unnoticed or nearly unobserved existence: the lines of external hard flat surfaces with soft camp white drapes, the rhythms of techno music that circulates its ancient bones, the swirling air and thud of bullets in its hidden rifle range, the voices that drift like clouds through its halls and passageways and the honeycomb terracotta sinew that bolsters its elegant serenity.

For more from Alex Hetherington, see his current Modern Edinburgh Film School exhibition MOTHS at Summerhall, Edinburgh. Full details on Central Station here.

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Modern Edinburgh Film School combines moving image, curating, collaboration, publications and critical writing. These work together on themes of learning about film and its ideas, working with moving image artists and their films, sculpture and poetry. Find out more about their latest project, MOTHS below.

MOTHS is a partial or pretend narrative presented between public and private (hidden) spaces alluding to their multiple and prior occupancy and historical functions and across artists’ images, films, readings, performances and sculptures. It employs cues from a spectrum of dark and light and comedy and tragedy with gestures that attach to and detach from themes of human interactions with animal information, natural and synthetic substances and methods of healing, evocative, sensorial or secretive sculptural actions, their material properties and suggested narratives, and recollections of the factual and science fiction.

It has been inspired by works by the Glasgow-based visual artist Lucy Skaer, and her particular approach to sculpture and moving image: “As an artist who once claimed to have secreted moth and butterfly larvae into the Old Bailey and reportedly left a scorpion and a diamond lying side by side” as well as sculptural works in copper, resin and mahogany and screen printed photographs for her show Harlequin Is As Harlequin Does at Murray Guy Gallery in New York in 2012: “these sculptures are like figures that act, interrupt, deflect, and solicit. Each has the pretence of a narrative, the mahogany, for example, is over a century old; it was salvaged from a riverbed in Belize where it had sunk while in transit to the UK.”

The core of the MOTHS project is a broadsheet newspaper edition with a series of 8 screen printed ‘colour supplements’, a schedule of film and video screenings, a reading and performance, and sculptural objects whose material properties relate to the ephemeral and to metamorphosis. Some of the works in the exhibition are hidden or slight, ephemeral or like the newspaper and editions, made to disappear, to exit the gallery.

Strain Andromeda The by Anne McGuire

Work by Mairi Lafferty

Contributing artists are Zoë Fothergill who re-screens her video ‘Fur, Bizmuth & Spiny Oyster’, a work where she explores tactility and the sensorial, the state of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response: a perceptual and pleasurable response to visual, aural or tactile stimulus. American artist Anne McGuire will screen her video work ‘Strain Andromeda The’, the 1970s seminal science fiction film about an extra-terrestrial virus, cut scene-by-scene in backward chronology, documentation of Lucy Skaer’s sculptures will be reproduced in the newspaper alongside a new print by Edinburgh-based artist Mairi Lafferty, Glasgow based artist Katrina Vallé will present a reading which takes as its starting point an exploration of the spectrum from light to dark, dusk to dawn, while Amy Pickles will present a new performance. London based film artist Anna Lucas will be screening her film ‘Una de Gato’ which documents her journey to find the home of this rare plant, also known as Cat’s Claw, her film alludes to its association with numerous medicinal, spiritual and superstitious beliefs and in a double bill with Australian artist Allison Gibbs’ work ‘SPIRIT SHADOW SPECTRE BONES and PHANTOM’, a work based around the making of ‘Tabu: A Story of the South Seas’ (1931), the final film produced by the German Expressionist director F.W Murnau. It starts with an article published by Allison in the magazine ‘Tahiti-Pacifique’, an exploration of the Polynesian Ti plant and a visit to a medium.

SPECTRE by Allison Gibbs

Bone by Jenny Brady

Dublin-based artist Jenny Brady screens two recent films – ‘Bone’ which draws on research into methods of non-verbal exchange developed in animal science, it considers whether language is primarily an instrument of communication or control and ‘Wow and Flutter’, which alludes to a scientific collaboration between animal cognition scientist Irene Pepperberg and an African Grey parrot she trained in elements of human language. While Bobby Niven represents sculptural work from his film ‘ISLAND’, shot at Inchgarvie, underneath the Forth Rail Bridge, the film explores its intricate and strange cultural landscape, military outpost, isolated refuge for syphilis victims, later a prison and quarantine for plague victims.

The newspaper also carries a text on Henry Coombes’ film ‘Two Discs and a Zed’, which sees a wolf set free in the National Galleries of Scotland to gaze mysteriously at Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’ and Peter Paul Rubens’ masterpiece ‘The Feast of Herod’. This text makes references to Peter Greenaway’s ‘A Zed and Two Noughts’, a gothic fantasy set in a zoo, the ‘House of Wax’ and Peter Weir’s film of disappearance and the sublime: ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’.

With thanks to Gregor Morrison, LUX and Video Data Bank, Chicago.

MOTHS will be at Summerhall, Edinburgh from 4 June – 15 July 2015. 

Modern Edinburgh Film School produced a series of projects in 2013 across Edinburgh on film and sculpture and in 2014 produced ‘The Silver River’, at Gallery of Modern Art, programmed as part of Glasgow International and has curated the film programme for the exhibition ‘Ripples on the Pond’ at Gallery of Modern Art, which is currently on display until April 2016. Recent writing includes Stan Douglas, Isa Genzken, Anna Oppermann, Hugo Canoilas and Florian and Michael Quistrebert. Find our more about Modern Edinburgh Film School on Central Station here.

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Curators Katie Bruce and Modern Edinburgh Film School (Alex Hetherington) introduce their upcoming group exhibition at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow.

‘I am often working in the space of its conveyance’

BOMB Live: Sharon Hayes in conversation with Lawrence Weiner: In the Open: Art and Architecture in Public Spaces, 2011

What 1991 looked like most of the time, 1991, Jo Spence in collaboration with David Roberts, collection of Glasgow City Council, Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums), © the artist’s estate.

Ripples on the Pond is an exhibition which has at its core works from the Glasgow Museums’ Collection. It takes as the starting point recent acquisitions from the Glasgow Women’s Library 21 Revolutions series, relating them to other works in the collection and sparking questions about gender, themes and media choice in relation to women’s practice and visibility.

Ripples on the Pond is also curated as a conversation between the works in the collection on paper and moving image and the invitation to Modern Edinburgh Film School and LUX Scotland to programme artists screenings within and beyond the gallery space. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to be part of that conversation and the exhibition can be seen as an essay that is to be read, re-read, critiqued and rethought, (unknowing where the ripples might effect). The programme by Modern Edinburgh Film School can be seen as a sister essay: responding to, commenting on, critiquing the holdings and re-imagining a collection through conversations with other works.

Return to Nature (Version Two), Jo Spence in collaboration with Terry Dennett, From The Final Project, 1991–92, collection of Glasgow City Council, Glasgow Life (Glasgow Museums), © the artist’s estate.

Anne Colvin, A Room Full of Stones, 2014, courtesy the artist

Modern Edinburgh Film School’s film programme is an extended discussion on the nature of film and its ephemerality, the subjects that the artists look at, often times in shared concerns and drawing on similar materials, that allows the themes to gather and grow. The exhibition and the film programme looks at ideas like play, feminine presence, landscape, portraiture and draws together moving image artists whose work touches on these subjects or makes connections, comparisons or juxtapositions to each other and to the works on paper.

It has been a joy to uncover works held between acid free tissue paper in salander conservation boxes, often unseen in public for a number of years, and place them alongside recent acquisitions. Themes of play, landscape, feminism, place and visibility emerge and as the exhibition is coming into being we are learning more about the works in the collection and understanding the genealogy of practice, both locally and internationally, of  women artists living and working in Glasgow. The artists in the work on paper exhibition are Sam Ainsley, Claire Barclay, Georgina Beier, Vanessa Bell, Kate Davis, Helen de Main, Jacqueline Donachie, Joan Eardley, Karen Guthrie, Ilana Halperin, Barbara Hepworth, Louise Hopkins, Roni Horn, Bet Low, Patricia MacDonald, Mari Mahr, Shauna McMullan, Jacki Parry, Ciara Phillips, Nina Pope, Carol Rhodes, Zineb Sedira, Lucy Skaer, Jo Spence, Corin Sworn, Amanda Thomson, Jane Topping, Emily Jacir and Alison Watt.

My approach to the collection is to see it as a kind of consciousness: alert, describing, thinking and developing and wanted to approach the film essay based on a series of live interviews with the artists, which took place over Skype, Messenger, by email and in letters as well as in person. The selection for the essay called A Poetic Measurement looks at the works of Anne Colvin, Sarah Forrest, Anne-Marie Copestake, Rosalind Nashashibi, Allison Gibbs, Karen Cunningham, Mairi Lafferty, Annabel Nicolson, Lauren Gault, and Catherine Street, and finds among the conversations ideas that artists have about their work now but also how they might be framed together in pairs, duos and quartets, finding proximities and abrasions in their works, articulating their thoughts and how its shapes their films and how in turn that gestures to the screen and in that way the film programme as it unfolds over 11 months becomes a kind of choreography.

Ripples on the Pond is curated by Katie Bruce and being developed with Affiliate: Thinking Collections (a University of Glasgow programme funded by Creative Scotland) and Modern Edinburgh Film School, along with LUX Scotland and Glasgow Women’s Library.

Ripples on the Pond will be on display in Gallery 4 at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow from 27 March 2015 – 28 February 2016.

Find our more about Modern Edinburgh Film School on Central Station here.

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Alex Hetherington founded Modern Edinburgh Film School which combines moving image, curating, collaboration, publications, talks and critical writing. These work together on themes of learning about film and its ideas, moving image artists and their films, sculpture and poetry, and new expressions founded in discussion. It produced a series of works and projects in 2013 across Edinburgh on film and sculpture including Ute Aurand: FILME at Stills, The Slow-Wave and Videotheque at Talbot Rice Gallery, The Hand that Holds the Desert Down, April Set, Lauren Gault: Granular and Crumb and Hold This Object Up Until There is Nothing Left of You at ESW, Green Screen at Embassy Gallery, 6000 Posters for Giants and Dwarfs at Rhubaba Gallery and The Good Work, New Media Scotland, and in 2014 produced The Silver River, at Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow for Atelier Public 2 programmed as part of Glasgow International, “A New Island forming…” for Annuale, Embassy Gallery and Queer Information, an anthology of experimental writing and poetry. Recent published writing includes 21 Revolutions, ‘Men Gather, In Speech’, Karen Cunningham, Stan Douglas, Georgina Starr, Anne Colvin, Isa Genzken, Anna Oppermann, Studio Jamming, Kathrin Sonntag and Counterpoint. Modern Edinburgh Film School is currently working on an essay and film programme reflecting on the subject of Women and Works on Paper for Gallery of Modern Art in 2015.

My Top Five

David Bussel: Isa Genzken

I’m making resoundingly personal choices here, reflecting on certain stages of my life and work: here Bussel introduces Isa Genzken’s extraordinary Botanical Garden which I wrote about for This is Tomorrow, so that takes on a different viewing experience when looking at the exhibition and this video of it, but am “re-mindful” of my own emotional chaos that summer that Isa’s space of collage, minutiae, flowers, roses, paints, a Mike Kelley obituary, gems, toys, aerosols and Michael Jackson dance routines mirrored.

Susan Hiller: Re-Sounding

I love this video of Hiller discussing her work, its relationship to science, the spiritual, phenomenon, the unsubstantiated outside of our gaze and am reminded of my current writing and thinking about artists Mairi Lafferty and Allison Gibbs, and to traces of people I admire like Craig Mulholand, Darren Banks and Michelle Hannah, you can see them in her, and I’m reminded that Hiller’s An Entertainment was one of the first exhibitions I worked on, operating the four VHS decks that had to be started manually and in sync.

Georgina Starr: The History of Sculpture and Before Le Cerveau Affamé

I am mentioning these two documents on Georgina Starr’s project at Cooper Gallery, curated by Sophia Hao, and of Starr’s absolute generosity in allowing me to watch her make her film and performance, write about her work and think extensively about the voice in contemporary art with Ella Finer, and to the team of dancers, assistants and the photographer Ross Fraser McLean when the installation was being made – a truly beautiful moment.

Pipilotti Rist at Tramway, Show A Leg

So here is the time Tramway was turned into the inside of Swiss artist Rist’s head: sight, sound, music, transparencies, collages and video overlaps, purple walking shoes and elegant skirts, paragliding down the sides of Glasgow high rises, her naked body using a bed as a trampoline – I haunted this exhibition during its installation, with its net curtain screens, moving image poetry, positive hysteria and special craziness.

Carolee Schneemannn

I heard Carolee talk about her extensive practices, visual art, gender, sexuality and the body at a show called Wack! at PS1 in Brooklyn when I was spending a lot of time in the USA, I think that exhibition helped me focus a lot on my relationship and interests in the work of women artists and to the importance of talking to artists when shaping projects that represent them, that capture certain moments in their practices: unfolding, shaping, moving, working.

Find out more about Modern Edinburgh Film School on Central Station here.

This is the third part of an ongoing series selecting films from SummerhallTV’s archive. Take a look at the first installment by Dave Rushton and the second by Bill Millett. For a chance to curate your very own SummerhallTV film selection, please email Central Station on hello@thisiscentralstation.com.

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Modern Edinburgh Film School is an education, research and production project that aims to explore, through a temporary participatory film school, combined themes of the sculptural screen, narrative and space, event as image, and acoustics and noise as form. It is an ambitious project that develops over participation with moving image artists, a curriculum of published film essays on recent and historical figures in moving image practices, a group show and screenings and the development of a new film that seeks to identify and explore the poetry embedded in an “Edinburgh screen, an Edinburgh camera” taken from an essay an American artist wrote in the late 1960s/early 1970s about art and film in Edinburgh.

The project seeks to raise funds to assist in the costs of publications, and to pay a group of artists in filmmaking and the moving image to contribute to the School as visiting lecturers, as faculty.

The work has a venue for next year, to be finally confirmed  and has attracted some public funding and while I am attracted to crowd-funding it does not seem practical to the nature of the show, which is discreet and academic. With this in mind I have created a small temporary print shop, featuring five new limited edition prints in the hope that this will raise £400-£1000 to contribute to the print costs for the Curriculum essays and artists fees.

The School will present a series of sessions on film and poetry, with the notion of a symposium and graduation at its completion. These themes are: “On Spaces of Uncertain Function”, “A Transmitter of Mysteries”, “Filming Day for Night, its message is open and allusive”, “This space evaporates, pursues, too,  yet requests time”, “flowers and questions, indoor: blue, black, permanent”, “Sculptural revisions, additions, equally found on photographs, maybe poetry and  possibly films” and “Displayed revisions echo future actions.”

It continues my work across the possibilities of combined media: writing, performance, sculptural installation, photographic images and recorded sound, alongside a deepening enquiry into the constructs of  and ephemeral gestures of identity, knowledge, feminine connotations and perception, which has included curated projects Belle Helaine for The Briggait, Heavy Influence for ESW and The Consequence for CCA/Intermedia, the installation Leves Vos Skinny Fists Comme Antennas to Heavenfor The Embassy, the performance Untitled (2011) at Edinburgh International Film Festival, the film Linda Fratianne for CCA and writing on Rosemarie Trockel, Kate V Robertson, Tim Rollins and K.O.S. and Kai-Oi Jay Yung.

Modern Edinburgh Film School will call for participants and contributions from Edinburgh-based education sites in moving image, and contemporary visual artists by invitation.

Find more about the project on Tumblr and follow Alex on Twitter here.