Skip to main content

James Pfaff: Alex & Me

Street Level, Glasgow until July 1st
Four stars

‘Ever been Changed by Someone?’ asks the nightclub-coloured neon sign from the corner wall of Glasgow-born artist James Pfaff’s intimate excavation and reconstruction of his own past. As the words beam out in scrawly hand-writing, given the extent which Pfaff has been so profoundly affected by his subject, the words might just as well be Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)?

Such a hormonal rush of doomed amours is all over Pfaff’s document of a road trip he made in 1998 from Toronto to New Orleans then back north to New York. He did all this with a woman called Alex, a muse who lingers still in this ever expanding homage to her that was first captured in a book curated, as with the exhibition, by another woman, Francesca Seravalle.

Laid out alongside a whole pile of scrap-books, Pfaff’s prodigal’s return is both a purging and a taking stock, a not so secret diary of fleeting moments which are captured, contained, immortalised and fictionalised as a visual poem and possibly unreliable memoir of times past. Look, there’s Alex, shy and gamine in black and white, hands up to the camera or else hiding her giggling face. And see, there’s Alex at the wheel in colour, holding a cigarette and wearing shades. Now look over there, it’s Alex again, posing with a gun and looking invincible in an image scaled up to become a monumental pin-up.

Like studied reimaginings of On the Road, A Bout de Souffle and Bonnie and Clyde, Alex & Me is a rom-com, a tragedy and a runaway romance seen through one man’s rose-tinted Raybans. It’s the beginning and end of a beautiful adventure every would-be beatnik wants to have, wild at heart and weird on top. All of which makes you wonder what Alex is doing now, why isn’t she here, and what’s her story anyway? 

The List, April 2018


ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Maids

Dundee Rep

Two sisters sit in glass cases either side of the stage at the start of Eve Jamieson's production of Jean Genet's nasty little study of warped aspiration and abuse of power. Bathed in red light, the women look like artefacts in some cheap thrill waxworks horror-show, or else exhibits in a human zoo. Either way, they are both trapped, immortalised in a freak-show possibly of their own making.

Once the sisters come to life and drape themselves in the sumptuous bedroom of their absent mistress, they raid her bulging wardrobe to try on otherwise untouchable glad-rags and jewellery. As they do, the grotesque parody of the high-life they aspire to turns uglier by the second. When the Mistress returns, as played with daring abandon by Emily Winter as a glamour-chasing narcissist who gets her kicks from drooling over the criminal classes, you can't really blame the sisters for their fantasy of killing her.

Slabs of sound slice the air to punctuate each scene of Mart…
Post a Comment
Read more

Phoebe Waller-Bridge - Fleabag

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is a busy woman. The thirty-two year old actress who burst onto our TV screens as writer and star of Fleabag, the tragi-comic sort of sit-com about a supposedly independent woman on the verge is currently overseeing Killing Eve, her new TV drama which she's written for BBC America. As an actress, Waller-Bridge is also filming a big screen project which we can't talk about, but which has already been outed as being part of the ongoing Star Wars franchise.

These are both pretty good reasons why Waller-Bridge won't be appearing in the brief Edinburgh Festival Fringe revival of the original stage play of Fleabag, when it opens next week at the Underbelly, where it was first unleashed to the world in 2013. In her place, Maddie Rice will take on the role of the potty-mouthed anti-heroine after touring Vickie Jones' production for Waller-Bridge and Jones' DryWrite company in association with Soho Theatre. This doesn't mean Waller-Bridge has turned…
Post a Comment
Read more

Futureproof 2017

Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow until February 4th 2018
Four stars

Now in its ninth year, Futureproof's showcase of recent graduate photographers from seven Scottish art schools and universities returns to its spiritual home at Street Level, with nineteen artists embracing photo essays, abstraction and constructed narratives. It is Karlyn Marshall's Willies, Beuys and Me that grabs you first. Tucked in a corner, this depiction of a woman impersonating iconic artist Joseph Beuys says much about gender stereotyping, and recalls Manfred Karge's play, Man to Man, in which a German woman took on her dead husband's identity.

The personal and the political converge throughout. Ben Soedera's Foreign Sands contrasts natural resources and the constructed world. Gareth and Gavin Bragdon's The Bragdon Brothers moves onto the carnivalesque streets of Edinburgh. Kieran Delaney's Moments also looks at the apparently ordinary. Matthew Buick goes further afield, as tourists…
Post a Comment
Read more