Edinburgh Printmakers until July 20
4 stars
At first glance, this body of some thirty-eight architecture-based
prints and 3D constructions look like blueprints for some Russian
constructivist science-fiction futurescape built for a Tarkovsky film
by way of a Ladybird book. Look closer, however, beyond the
sleekly-angled swish of the lines, and you'll see that these visions of
the future were built some time ago, be it as airports, stadiums or any
other epically proportioned hub of congregation, comings or goings as
befits of any international big city metropolis brimming with ambition.
There's a utopian urgency at play here, in images of locales that range
from Charles de Gaule airport in Paris to Meadowbank Stadium and beyond
that look like nothing on earth. With everything seemingly in motion
amidst a fanfare of metallic greens and bloodrush reds, there's a
wide-eyed sense of wonder in Sleigh's stranger's gaze that suggests she
too might have come from another planet. There's something heroic too
in the wooden and wire constructions dotted about the gallery like some
undiscovered stratosphere, implying a voyage of discovery at every
turn.
One imagines the theme tune fanfares and sweeping strings of jet age
pop anthropology show Wicker’s World being piped through these
reimagined monuments as travellers pass through borders. Either that,
or else the des-res idyll of 'Home Is Heavenly Springs,' the space-age
installation brought to Edinburgh's Princes Street Gardens by art/pop
conceptualists A Sudden Sway a quarter of a century ago.
While the practical day-to-day reality of Sleigh's subjects with all
their failures, design faults and terminal obsolescence will never
match her unsullied visions, Sleigh is in one sense capturing a purity
of an imagined future that went beyond mere functionality. In this
sense, 'construct' is a form of legitimised nostalgia, both for a past
intent on conquering worlds, and for an age yet to come.
The List, June 2013
ends
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