Dundee Contemporary Arts
April 7th-June 10th 2012
4 stars
It makes sense that the site of DCA used to be
Scott Myles’ playground. Back then he was a skater-boy and it was a
bricks-and-mortar garage reimagined as the sort of makeshift skate-park
for local heroes and future high-flyers which under the Scottish
Government’s recently imposed changes to public entertainment licensing
laws would today be illegal.
For his first major UK solo show, the Dundee born and trained artist
has reclaimed the building’s interior with an even more playful
flourish in DCA’s latest world-turned-upside-down subversions of
everyday work, rest and play. Mass production consumables are
reinvented for some half-remembered dreamscape as retro Habitat
reproductions are painted black and stuck to the first gallery wall,
while a swivel-seat skeleton on a chat show platform has a giant prism
where its seat should be.
‘STABILA (Black and Blue)' is a series of twenty-four screen-printed
images taken from courtroom evidence of the injuries incurred when one
workie attacked another with a spirit level on a Glasgow building site,
turning tools you can trust into weapons of another trade beyond the
flesh wounds and hard knocks of Auf Wiedersehn Pet style manual labour.
The trail bridges into the second gallery, where the sort of imagined
red-brick wall that did for John Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos is split
into a full-size 3D jigsaw. The word BOY posted up in orange
letters on 1980s hoarding conjures up the clatter of baseball-capped,
baggy-panted hip-hop. It’s a gang mentality that’s reflected too on the
two bus shelters painted perfect silver, one on top of the other to
loiter with intent beside. Emotional debris of a different kind can be
seen in the oversize
folders customised with splash-paint splurges that see Myles’
filed-away ideas spilling over into a stoner’s paradise. That’s livin’,
alright.
The Herald, May 2012
ends
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