Alasdair Gray Season: Spheres of Influence II is an exhibition currently at The Glasgow School of Art’s Reid Gallery until 25 January. The show seeks to provide an alternative reading of Alasdair Gray’s visual work by showcasing both historical and contemporary works. See work from Gray’s personal archive in the exhibition which forms part of the larger Alasdair Gray Season, celebrating the artist’s 80th birthday across Glasgow.

In addition, a series of talks will run around various themes including emasculation, class, the grotesque and fonts. Hear from Rachel Maclean about ‘Brawny Bachelors & Macho Maidens‘ on 19 December and Edwin Pickstone in his talk ‘A potted history of the alphabet and its designs’ on 14 January.

Fore more about the exhibition which runs until 25 January, see the GSA website here.

Images courtesy of GSA with credit to Alan Dimmick

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

//////

Find more events in our weekly bulletin here.

Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival returns for its 10th anniversary from 17 – 21 September. Focusing on the theme of Border Crossing, the five day festival will feature film premieres, site-specific installations, workshops and live events.

The opening gala and UK premiere, Maramosh by Momcilo Mrdakovic explores the journey of middle-aged cinephile and film projectionist Pera from war-torn Serbia to New York. Installations can be found around Berwick and include work from artists Rachel Maclean, Douwe Dijkstra and Kristina Cranfeld amongst others exploring complex questions about identity and war. Orchestra of Samples is a live event by Addictive TV which delivers electronic music with visuals; the music will be provided by a group of virtual musicians from all over the world who have never met.

Find more information about the festival programme here.

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

//////

Find more events in our weekly bulletin here.

///

The theme for this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival commissions programme has been Parley. As a result the programme has considered how art can be an agent of discussion, negotiation and debate. Various strands of event have been formed around this notion, led by our commissioned artists and guest speakers.

The first Parley Discussion, curated and led by Ross Sinclair, kick-started the festival as an open platform for exploration into discussion and performance with the audience being led through a series of conversations and collaborations. Live art was happening across Krijn De Koning’s Land as speakers such as Maria Fusco presented abstract narratives and explored the notion of Utopia. Performers such as Phoebe Amis lifted the experience with her incredibly high-pitched vocal abilities which echoed across the Sculpture Court. This certainly created an environment that took the viewers out of their initial comfort zones of experiencing visual arts. Lighthearted performances such as this were contrasted with the harsh social realism film Autumn Leaves, created by Kenyerse.  The whole experience felt like a whirlwind journey through discursive content which compliments Ross Sinclair’s commission Real Life and How to Live it in Auld Reekie, a series of informative graphics found all over Edinburgh.

Ross Sinclair performing at the opening Edinburgh Art Festival Parley Discussion. Photograph by Kat Gollock.

For the programme of talks that followed, each artist was partnered with a speaker whose specialty relates to the work in question without necessarily coming from an artistic point of view; this allowed for a huge scope of discussion covering social, political and historical contexts.

Robert Montgomery, the artist behind the Edinburgh Fire Poem, spoke with Ryan Van Winkle, poet, performer & podcaster, about their differing use and expression of poetry (Robert’s being bold, visual & public, whereas Ryan approaches the same subject with a personal caution, not intending for all his written words to be widely read).

Robert Montgomery, Edinburgh Fire Poem, 2013. Image courtesy of Dael Poulter.

Our final commission-based Parley was this week’s “in conversation” between Krijn De Koning, the artist behind the sculptural, architectural intervention Land in Edinburgh College of Art’s Sculpture Court, and Edward Hollis. Edward is based at Edinburgh College of Art and specializes in architecture so the conversation was particularly pertinent. They talked in depth about how artworks unite with the space they are located in; how they can expand the volume and impact of the chosen space. Uniquely, this conversation took place on the work in question.

Krijn de Koning and Edward Hollis in conversation on Land, one in a series of artist talks as part of Parley.

To see the work used physically and metaphorically as a platform for this conversation was perfectly representative of Parley. Krijn spoke honestly about all aspects of his work touching on the use, or lack thereof, of colour across his works as well as the physical process of transforming such a large piece from initial drawings and model works.

We are now sadly drawing to the end of our programme of discussions, but there is one remaining and we are certain to go out with a bang. Parley Discussion: Tae Think Again, Rethinking Identity in Contemporary Scotland, curated by Rachel Maclean and co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival and Edinburgh Printmakers, is this Saturday.

Similar to our opening Parley Discussion, the afternoon will see a programme of performances and speakers. Speakers include Craig Coulthard, David Cameron, David McCrone, Duncan Petrie and Denise Mina and the event will be chaired by Jim Tough with an introduction from Alastair Snow. Expect to delve into the history and future of Scottish identity with the added bonus of a screening of Rachel Maclean’s recent and highly acclaimed work The Lion and The Unicorn.

Venue for the Edinburgh Art Festival Parley Discussions. Krijn de Koning, Land, 2013, co-commissioned by Edinburgh Art Festival and Edinburgh College of Art. Photograph by Kat Gollock.

Parley Discussion: Tae Think Again, Rethinking Identity in Contemporary Scotland (curated by Rachel Maclean), Saturday 31 August, 2-5pm, free.

Edinburgh College of Art
74 Lauriston Place
EH3 9DF

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

//////

See more articles by Edinburgh Art Festival here.

///

In his work Land, Krijn de Koning makes familiar works disappear from view, or manifest in surprising ways, in a series of platforms encasing several iconic works from Edinburgh College of Art’s cast collection.

Venus de Medici, photograph by Kat Gollock

The Venus de Medici cowers in the corner. The Nike of Samothrace is buried up to her thighs, her wings at head height. Discobolus roots around underneath the raised platform’s plywood floor. The Venus de Milo and Spinario also make appearances.

Nike of Samothrace, photograph by Kat Gollock

The Sculpture Court, photograph by Kat Gollock

Krijn de Koning’s structures offer new possibilities to navigate and experience the space they inhabit. This new work has been developed for the Sculpture Court at Edinburgh College of Art, who are co-commissioning this work. Typical of his practice, Land initiates a direct dialogue with the hosting space.

A site for several Parley events during the festival, de Koning’s latest work offers an active platform for framing questions, and excavating and exploring ideas.

Talk on the platform, photograph by Kat Gollock

Parley events still to come:

Krijn de Koning in conversation with Edward Hollis
Krijn de Koning will discuss his work and its implications with architect, teacher and writer Edward Hollis, author of ‘The Secret Lives of Buildings’ and ‘The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors’.
27 August, 6-7pm, free

Parley Discussion: Tae Think Again, Rethinking Identity in Contemporary Scotland (curated by Rachel Maclean)
Responding to the upcoming 2014 referendum on Scottish Independence, this symposium curated by artist Rachel Maclean intends to delve deeper than a simple yes/no debate and look at the broader social, cultural and historical background to a discussion of contemporary Scottish national identity. The event will begin with a screening of the artist’s recent work The Lion and the Unicorn.
31 August, 2-5pm, free

Talk on the platform, photograph by Kat Gollock

Read more at www.edinburghartfestival.com.

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

///

Our programme of public art commissions for this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival is titled Parley, exploring both art that depends on dialogue for its realization and art’s capacity to create dialogue.

Opening with Ross Sinclair and company pondering the role of the artist and closing with a discussion of contemporary Scottish national identity, Parley events also traverse a puppet play, performances and ‘in-conversation’ pieces by our 2013 commissioned artists. We’re discussing them already!

Parley events are bookable on www.edinburghartfestival.com and are all free with the exception of the Wind Pipes for Edinburgh concerts. Spaces are limited.

Here are just some of the highlights.

Parley Discussion: Real Life Parledonia (curated by Ross Sinclair)
2 August, 2-5pm

Artist Ross Sinclair adopts the role of ring master to direct a loose array of speakers, performers and artists, in debating questions such as: ‘what is Parley? And what is Caledonia? And how might they come together locally, nationally and internationally? What is the job description of ‘artists’ in a small damp Northern European country in 2013? What is a ‘creative life’ and how can the idea be articulated by ourselves and others at this particularly complicated moment in time?’.

Parley for Power
2 August, 5:30-6pm

Based in a world where cats and dogs engage in wild debate over issues of identity and independence. A vote will determine whether they rid themselves of the moniker of ‘pet’ and all associated ties to their petitude.

Parley for Power is a short play written for the festival by poet Michael Pedersen (Neu! Reekie!) and award-winning playwright/novelist Alan Bissett.

Parley: Katri Walker in conversation with Noe Mendelle
6 August, 6-7pm

Katri Walker will be in conversation with Noe Mendelle, an internationally renowned documentary maker and Director of the Scottish Documentary Institute.

Parley Discussion: Is all this hot air worth it?
10 August, 1:30-4pm

Artistic activity produces tonnes of CO2 – particularly the international movement of artists, artworks and audiences. What responsibility do artists and arts organisations have to use the form, content and framing of their work to address climate change? With a provocation from the artists Collins & Goto, Creative Carbon Scotland’s discussion invites contributions from across the arts.

Parley: Peter Liversidge and Brigadier David Allfrey MBE
13 August, 1-2pm

Peter Liversidge will be in conversation with Brigadier David Allfrey MBE, producer of The Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

Parley: Robert Montgomery in conversation
13 August, 6-7pm

Robert Montgomery’s conversation partner will be announced shortly.

Parley: Daniel Padden and Peter Nicholson (The Complaints Choir) in conversation with Katie Overy
20 August, 7-8pm

We’ve just announced on our website that Daniel Padden and Peter Nicholson of The Complaints Choir of Edinburgh will be in conversation with Katie Overy, Senior Lecturer in Music Psychology at the University of Edinburgh. The Complaints Choir invites people to come together to share their complaints, and sing them out loud.

This is one of a series of events every Tuesday during the festival where our commissioned artists are engaged in conversation with specialists from other disciplines that provide a counter-point to the artist’s practice and interests.

Parley: Krijn de Koning in conversation with Edward Hollis
27 August, 6-7pm

Krijn de Koning will be in conversation with Edward Hollis, author of ‘The Secret Lives of Buildings’ and ‘The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors’.

Parley Discussion: Tae Think Again, Rethinking Identity in Contemporary Scotland (curated by Rachel Maclean)
31 August, 2-5pm

Responding to the upcoming 2014 referendum on Scottish Independence, this symposium curated by artist Rachel Maclean intends to delve deeper than a simple yes/no debate and look at the broader social, cultural and historical background to a discussion of contemporary Scottish national identity.

More: Website | Facebook | Twitter

Still from Maclean’s film The Lion and the Lady

Artist Rachel Maclean has just been announced as the winner of this year’s Glasgow Film Festival Margaret Tait Award. The award recognises Scottish artists and Scotland-based artists who work within film and moving image in an experimental and innovative way. Named after acclaimed Scottish experimental filmmaker Margaret Tait, the award is supported by Creative Scotland & LUX. It consists of a prize fund of £10,000 and the opportunity to present a new commission at Glasgow Film Festival in 2014.

Glasgow-based Maclean graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2009. She works largely in green screen composite video, using colourful props, costumes and sculpture. She is often the only actor in her work, playing a variety of characters that mime to popular music.

28 nominations were received for the award and 7 artists – Michelle Hannah, Rob Kennedy, Rachel Maclean, Sophie Macpherson, Gillian Steel, Sarah Tripp, and Stina Wirfelt – were shortlisted to put forward a proposal for final selection by Glasgow Film Festival’s Margaret Tait panel. Maclean’s proposed film, titled Happy and Glorious, will be a darkly comedic exploration of British national identity. The film will create a discursive space in response to the context of 2014, in relation to the upcoming referendum on Scottish Independence, as well as the 700th anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn and the 100th anniversary of the beginning of The First World War.

Rachel was chosen unanimously by the judging panel for the 2013 Margaret Tait Award. The panel said:
“Rachel appears most definitely to be on the cusp of something big with upcoming exhibitions this year at the Collective Gallery (Edinburgh) and Edinburgh Printmakers as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, and a solo show at CCA during the Commonwealth Games in 2014. We find her work extremely unique – it certainly provokes a reaction!

Her proposal was strong and with its relation to national identity, it has a sense of urgency to it and grabs the moment.”

Portfolio Manager at Creative Scotland, Amanda Catto said:
“We are delighted that Rachel Maclean has been selected as the 2013 Margaret Tait Award winner. The award will allow her the space and time to extend her practice within the medium of film and moving image and to develop partnerships with the film industry. Rachel’s new video work will be a fantastic addition to Glasgow Film Festival which showcases the very best of Scottish, UK and International work.”

Maclean said:
“I am delighted to have received the Margaret Tait Award and can’t wait to get started on a new video work. It’s a great opportunity to work with GFT and LUX and I am very excited to be a part of Glasgow Film Festival.”

Maclean joins previous winners Stephen Sutcliffe, Anne-Marie Copestake and Torsten Lauschmann for this prestigious award. For more information on the award, please visit here.

Read Rachel’s blog post she wrote on the making of her recent film, Germs for Central Station here.

Website | Facebook | Twitter

This is my favourite time in the festival planning cycle – when we not only know what’s going to be in the festival programme, but we can talk about it. This year is a particularly significant one for us as we celebrate our tenth edition – a kind of coming of age (although we are still the youngest of Edinburgh’s August festivals). Our programme reflects our growing ambition. We’ll have 45 exhibitions in over 30 venues across the city, as well as our largest programme of publicly sited commissions to date.

I’m really looking forward to having the time to reflect on what happens when artists collaborate with one another. This is something we have been considering in our Parley commissions programme, and there are some great exhibitions dedicated to this too. Inverleith House’s Mostly West explores the collaborations of the recently deceased Franz West with such major and diverse figures from the contemporary art world as Douglas Gordon, Mike Kelly, Sarah Lucas and Michelangelo Pistoletto.

Jupiter Artland is looking at the longstanding collaboration between Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, in an exhibition which includes the amazing Steam Powered Internet Machine (and for people who didn’t make it to Documenta last year (or did and loved it), there’s a one in a lifetime opportunity to see Sam Durant’s Scaffold).

Paul Rooney with Leeds United at Edinburgh College of Art is another interesting collaboration. Paul Rooney originally studied at ECA, and has been attracting increasing attention since winning the Northern Art Prize in 2008. If Mostly West shows us jointly authored works, Rooney and the artist collective Leeds United are making an exhibition which deliberately blurs the edges between each other’s practice – less a collaboration than a deliberate obliteration or confusion of the boundaries of individual authorship.

There’s some great new work by younger artists featured in this year’s programme. Rhubaba’s project with Polish artist, Lucy Pawlak, is a definite must see – the artist will set herself up for duration of the festival in the role of a Producer of a narrative feature film, and visitors, as well as invited experts will be invited to become involved in the creation of the final piece.

National Museum of Scotland have the second in a series of commissions which invite contemporary artists to work with their collections – Ilana Halperin has been exploring the museum’s geological and mineralogical collections. The other must-see at the museum is the Mary Queen of Scots exhibition which explores the elaborately crafted myth around the Queen which still retains its power today. It’s just one in a series of exhibitions in the programme which offer a timely reflection (in view of a certain impending date) on Scottish identity and its constructions. Bourne Fine Art’s exhibition considers how for over two centuries, artists have been crucial in the building a visual picture of Scottishness. While Rachel Maclean’s solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers offers a very contemporary response to some of those same questions.

And lest we think it’s all easily expressed with thistle and tartan, Talbot Rice’s Nam June Paik exhibition (which is also part of the Edinburgh International Festival) reminds us of the profoundly international outlook of Scotland as a nation. Pat Fisher, Senior Curator at the Talbot Rice recently gave a lecture at a Nam June Paik conference in Seoul, entitled ‘Nam June Paik; Honorary Scot’ – and faced with the enticing prospect of the first exhibition in Scotland (birthplace of electromagnetic theory and John Logie Baird) of the artist who incorporated the television into the world of art, it is hard not to see this as a homecoming of sorts.

Recently I’ve been working towards a 3-minute video for Channel 4 Random Acts. The piece was commissioned by Bold Yin, a newly formed Glasgow based production company, created by Robert Florence, Iain Connell and Joanne Daly and doing all sorts of work in and around the film, art and comedy genres.

Here is a still of me with a ‘Miracle Mask’ facemask on. I had to direct the dialogue at a C-stand in order that I matched the correct eye-line for when the second character was composited in post.

Random Acts invite artists and filmmakers from a whole host of backgrounds to make videos which are then screened in amongst the normal Channel 4 schedule of programmes and advert breaks. In turn, unlike most previous projects I’ve worked towards, the end context for the work is not strictly within the sphere of fine art or film, as telly watchers could stumble upon the video involuntarily and without the normal preface you get in a gallery or cinema.

I decided to explore an advert style format, in anticipation of the video being screened either at the beginning or the end of a commercial break. I was keen that it might initially camouflage into the stream of ads, but then break down and slowly reveal itself to be a fraud. As a genre, commercials adhere to very specific tropes and I was eager to pick these out and play around with them. In particular I was drawn to the recurrent use of faux scientific cross-sections or magnifications of skin, hair, stomachs, toilet bowls etc. Often showing sterile looking, computer generated particles being swept in or out of the respective area, illustrating the cleansing and/or nourishing properties of a particular product. In many cases there is the implication that the comfort and safety of your personal space, either the body or the home, is secretly threatened by the habitation of destructive microscopic forces, whether they are ‘free-radicals’ in your skin or bacteria in your toilet.

Here I am in the ‘germ’ costume, dancing to the ‘Mr Mask Multi-Task Germ Destroyer’ jingle.

Additionally, I was interested in looking at how accents and their class connotations are used as a way to communicate a particular brand identity. For example, bathroom-cleaning adverts are almost invariably voiced-over in an authoritative middle class male accent, often with a shouty, wartime British twang, as if implying that the extermination of toilet based dirt and grime is part of some larger military operation. However, the personified ‘germs in your toilet’, when vocal, are commonly Cockneys, addressing you with an aggressive or intimidating tone of voice.

After a long trawl through various adverts, new and old, I decided to create a short video that switched between a variety of commercial formats, specifically looking at perfume, facemask, yogurt and bathroom cleaner ads. I designed all the products and costumes so they would have a similar aesthetic, with brand names related to the word and function of a ‘mask’. So ‘Masque’ for the perfume, ‘Yogi-Mask’ for the yogurt, ‘Miracle Mask’ for the facemask and ‘Mr Mask’s Multi Task Germ Destroyer’ for the toilet cleaner. I then began to script, piece together a storyboard and work on costumes, part of which was produced during a short residency at the Mackintosh Gallery, called Three Points of Contact.

Here is me preparing to vomit up a ‘Yogi-mask’ yogurt. Below is the same shot with the green-screen keyed out and the background added in.

I normally work with found audio that I mime to on camera, but in this case I was keen to explore the idea of scripting the piece then recording the audio. I worked with Kirsty Strain, a Glasgow based actress to record the vocals, which involved her performing the script in a variety of accents, from Scarlett Johansson to a ‘shouty Margaret Thatcher’. Her performance was brilliant, incredibly witty and well observed and I was amazed by her ability to switch between different voices. I also worked with Julian Corrie or Miaoux Miaoux on the audio, which was great fun. He did a brilliant job and produced an amazingly funny toilet cleaner jingle for the end section of the film.

The video was shot entirely in a green-screen studio with me as the only actor, miming to the audio recorded with Kirsty and Julian the previous week. The 2-day shoot followed a manic and sleepless few days of costume and prop production, so I was pretty exhausted and confused. However, I just about managed to pull of an improvised dance routine in a life-size ‘germ’ costume, which was constructed using the contents of 2.5 double duvets. Consequently, the suit was so amazingly insulating that I was concerned I might pass out from heat exhaustion, so had to aim a fan into my face at intervals to cool down.

This is a close up of me as a crowd of germs in your toilet.

David Liddell worked as Director of Photography on the shoot and did a fantastic job, the quality and subtlety of light in the shots was wonderfully effective. Producer Joanne Daly and Assistant Director James Houston also put in an amazing effort during the production, despite both being ill at the time and unfortunately landed with various glamorous jobs such as cleaning a second hand toilet and dragging a faux fur couch through a narrow doorway. James had the specialist task of creating a fake blood spray effect for a scene in the video where a giant germ attacks the main character with a cleaning product. This was achieved through the use of a weed killer spray bottle and plastic tubing, which was good fun, if not slightly nerve racking given my worry that both me and the entire green-screen could easily be inadvertently sprayed with synthetic blood. This didn’t happen, so we were safe.

Following the shoot I put together some backgrounds on Photoshop and with James’ help on the green-screen keying, composited it all together on After Effects and did the final edit and output on Premiere.

Computer generated visualisation of the ‘Happy Bacteria’ in your gut.

It was a really fun project to work on and I’m looking forward to seeing the final video screened on Channel 4 and up on the Random Acts website soon. Keep an eye out and follow the links below if you are interested.

Update: View Rachel’s Random Acts film online here.

More: Website | Twitter

//////

‘Where I Make’ invites readers behind the scenes of artists from many disciplines to share photographs and a little insight about where they create their masterpieces. See more from the series here.