Exhibition Programme Archive 2008
Print the Legend: The Myth of the West
Curated by Patricia Bickers
Exhibition 1 March – 4 May 2008
Artists: Adam Chodzko, Douglas Gordon, Peter Granser, Isaac Julien, Mike Nelson, Cornelia Parker, Simon Patterson, Salla Tykkä and Gillian Wearing
“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance [Dir. John Ford], 1962
With these words, the editor of the fictional newspaper, The Shinbone Star, captures the essence of the myth of the American West, which exists in our imaginations more as legend than as fact. The exhibition Print the Legend brings together contemporary art which explores ideas about westerns and the myth of the West. Guest curator Patricia Bickers, an art historian, lecturer, writer and the editor of Art Monthly, uses her longstanding passion for westerns as a lens through which to look at a diverse group of artworks, against the backdrop of the current revival of the genre. Print the Legend contends that not only was the West a construct of North American Easterners, some of whom had never actually been out West, but that Europeans also contributed to the formation of both the idea and the reality of the West.
The work in Print the Legend acknowledges the continuing power of the myth of the West as both image and metaphor. The artists in the exhibition have been drawn to the western, to paraphrase Simon Patterson, not because of what it tells us about the past, but because of what it tells us about the present. For this group of artists, perhaps what is most compelling, and what they all share, is a fascination with the concept of the frontier, a meeting point or boundary that is always shifting.
The exhibition was given additional support by Edinburgh College of Art where both Douglas Gordon and Mike Nelson are Research Fellows.
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
• Exhibition report
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication, Print the Legend: The Myth of the west, 120pp
• DVD 13 mins
• Postcards
Lucy Skaer
Exhibition 17 May – 9 July 2008
Lucy Skaer makes drawings, sculptures and films, sometimes combining them in installations of all three. Her work asks new questions about how we make sense of what we see. It begins with the selection of images from newspapers and books, the internet, and iconic works of art, which Skaer then transforms. She redraws the images, enlarging them, repeating them and flipping them, breaking them down into patterns, or combining distinctly different types of images together to produce symmetrical or disrupted compositions. The process of viewing her work is active, involving exploring and gradually recognising images. This takes time, and leads us to question what it is we are seeing, and how we are seeing it.
Born in Cambridge in 1975, and a graduate in Environmental Art from the Glasgow School of Art, Skaer is gaining a considerable international reputation. In 2007 she was one of six artists to represent Scotland at the Venice Biennale. This exhibition presented new work commissioned by The Fruitmarket Gallery, shown in the context of an overview of Skaer’s practice since 2001. The new installations further developed her tendency to produce work that extends drawing beyond its two dimensions, so that it becomes almost sculptural or architectural. History, politics and the concept of death and its representations inform much of Skaer’s work, but it is the tension between abstraction and figuration that elicits the concentrated experience of looking in order to recognise images, to understand what is being represented. The effect of this experience is one of losing awareness of where the work ends, becoming engulfed in the realm of the image.
Supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation
Nominated for the Turner Prize 2009
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
• Talks and Events recordings
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication, Lucy Skaer, 112pp monograph
• DVD 12 mins
• Postcards
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
The House Of Books Has No Windows
Exhibition 31 July – 28 September 2008
This exhibition offered a rare chance to experience the work of one of the most internationally respected artist partnerships, exhibiting here for the first time in Scotland. Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller have been at the forefront of international attention since winning a special jury prize at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Their collaborative installations are multi-layered multimedia experiences. Using objects, images and sound, they collage together impressions and experiences, memory and history, mixing references to high and popular culture in works which draw an audience into a series of intensely credible fictions.
This exhibition brings together six installations, each using whatever means it needs to transport the viewer somewhere else. The installations unfold over time, and take time to view. Opera for a Small Room, The Muriel Lake Incident and Road Trip have a set duration. Self-contained narratives which begin and end, they loop continuously. The Killing Machine must be started by the viewer, and then runs its course, lapsing into stillness and silence until started again. The Dark Pool and The House Of Books Has No Windows are environments which the viewer
The work is mesmerising, as much theatre as installation. Original, imaginative and performative, it seems particularly appropriate to welcome it to Edinburgh at festival time.
Organised in collaboration with Modern Art Oxford. Supported by The Henry Moore Foundation, Outset Contemporary Art Fund, International Cultural Relations Division at Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT) and The Canada House Arts Trust
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
• Talks and Events recordings
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller:The House Of Books Has No Windows, 2 volume set
• DVD 14 mins
• Postcards
Close-Up: Proximity and defamiliarisation in art, film and photography
Curated by Dawn Ades and Simon Baker
Exhibition 24 October 2008 – 11 January 2009
This exhibition explored the transformative effects of the close-up in photography and film from the nineteenth century to the present. Magnification can heighten reality or reveal things invisible to the naked eye, but proximity and changes in scale can also render the world strange and unfamiliar.
Close-Up features a variety of forms of experimental photography and film both historic and contemporary, including a range of media and materials: lantern slides, microphotographs, rayographs, vintage and contemporary photographs and artists’ films. Key themes within the exhibition included the natural world, the human body and the re-imagining of everyday objects.
The exhibition continued The Fruitmarket Gallery’s ongoing series of ideas-driven, guest-curated group exhibitions in which scholars, artists and writers are invited to present new research ideas through the work of a number of artists. The curators of Close-Up are art historians specialising in surrealism and contemporary art. Dawn Ades is Professor in Art History and Theory at the University of Essex and Simon Baker is Lecturer in Art History at the University
of Nottingham.
Downloads:
• Exhibition guide
• Talks and Events recordings
Available from the bookshop:
• Publication, Close-Up: Proximity and defamiliarisation in art, film and photography, authors: Dawn Ades and Simon Baker
• DVD 13 mins
• Postcards
