Skip to main content

Jacob’s Ladder

Ingleby Gallery until October
Four stars

The blood moon eclipse may have beamed out of sight, but, fifty years after Stanley Kubrick’s A Space Odyssey transformed an Arthur C Clarke short story into an audacious widescreen epic, and just a year shy of half a century since man walked on the moon for real, space is still very much the place. With this in mind, Ingleby’s Edinburgh Art Festival group show of fifteen artists seen in tandem with the University of Edinburgh’s Astronomy Victorious exhibition aims for the stars. This is perfectly evoked by Colour Field (2016), Katie Paterson’s reimagining of the night sky with the dancing neon of Los Angeles after dark.

One can orbit from Marine Hugonnier’s redacted American and Russian newspaper front pages of the moon landings in Art For Modern Architecture (2018) past Katie Paterson’s moulded meteorite in Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky (2014) and the half-ton boulder of Alicja Kwade’s Stellar Day (2013) revolving in painfully anti-clockwise fashion. Both David Austen’s waggish film, Smoking Moon (2007), in which a crescent moon sucks on a tab, and George Melies’ vintage moving picture, Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902), that inspired it provide lightness amongst the weightiness, though it is left to From home (2018), Peter Liversidge’s seemingly free-standing tape measure and Jonny Lyons’ ladder in High Bias (2018) to really defy gravity.  

For all the supersonic trip-scapes on show, there is nothing on this planet that can compete with images taken by NASA and the crews of Apollo 8 and 9. Astronaut Bill Anders’ seminal Earthrise encapsulates a new dawn, and astonishes still.

The List, August 2018


ends

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Art School Dance Goes On Forever – Snapshots Of Masters Of The Multiverse

Intro – Snapshots – Deaf School

1

In 1980, the same year as the Manchester band, Magazine, released a 7
inch single called A Song From Under The Floorboards – a three verse
and chorus distillation of Dostoyevsky's novel, Notes From Underground
– an art school scandal occurred.

This scandal took place in Liverpool, and was based around a project
called the Furbelows, although it became better known in the Liverpool
Echo and other organs that reported it as the Woolly Nudes.

The Furbelows, or Woolly Nudes, were a group of artists who had come
out of Liverpool College of Art, who, dressed in grotesque woolly
costumes which featured knitted approximations of male and female
genitalia, made assorted public interventions around the city centre as
kind of living sculptures acting out assorted narratives.

The Furbelows project had been funded by what was then Merseyside Arts
Association, and, after the participants were arrested and taken to
court on obscenity charges after what…
Post a Comment
Read more

Peter Brook – The Prisoner

Peter Brook is no stranger to Scotland, ever since the guru of European and world theatre first brought his nine-hour epic, The Mahabharata, to Glasgow in 1988. That was at the city’s old transport museum, which by 1990 had become Tramway, the still-functioning permanent venue that opened up Glasgow and Scotland as a major channel for international theatre in a way that had previously only been on offer at Edinburgh International Festival.
Brook and his Paris-based Theatre des Bouffes du Nord company’s relationship with Tramway saw him bring his productions of La Tragedie de Carmen, La Tempete, Pellease et Mellisande, The Man Who…, and Oh Les Beaux Jours – the French version of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days – to Glasgow.
Thirty years on from The Mahabharata, Brook comes to EIF with another piece of pan-global theatre as part of a residency by Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, which Brook has led since he decamped to Paris from London in the early 1970s. The current Edinburgh residency has alr…
Post a Comment
Read more

Romeo And Juliet - Shakespeare's Globe Comes to Glasgow

Open-air Shakepeares are a summer-time perennial of the theatre calendar, attracting picnicking audiences as much as midges. More often than not, such romps through the grass are frothy, heritage industry affairs designed to be accompanied by strawberries and cream and not to be taken too seriously. Shakespeare’s Globe theatre company look set to change such perceptions when they open their outdoor tour of Romeo And Juliet in Glasgow next week as part of the West End festival.

For the two young actors taking the title roles of the doomed lovers, it will also be something of a homecoming. Richard Madden and Ellie Piercy both studied in Glasgow prior to turning professional. Indeed, Madden has yet to graduate from the acting course at RSAMD, and, as well as facing the pressures of playing such a meaty role in close proximity to the audience, will have the added anxiety of being assessed and graded by his tutors.

“This is the end of my third year,” says Madden following a Saturday mornin…
Post a Comment
Read more