GOMA, Glasgow until October 8th
Three stars
You can’t escape the elephant in the room in this
parallel universe group show programmed by incumbent Glasgow International director
Richard Parry, who has beamed down nine artists for a speculative-fiction
inspired exploration of possible futures in a messed-up world. The elephant in
question is captured in Telepath (2018), a cinema-scope sized close-up by John
Russell set against a backdrop of a re-made and re-modelled version of the
gallery interior, as if the beast had been captured in the wild and put on show
a la King Kong. Frozen in monumental hi-res, the image could be a trophy of an
endangered species poached from Ray Bradbury’s short story, A Sound of Thunder
by way of The Veldt.
Elsewhere,
Mai-Thu Perret’s Les Gurrillerres XIII (2018) imagines a feminist miltia in the
desert by way of a female mannequin in repose, reading on a rug with her machine
gun nestled beside her. E Jane’s The Avatar (2015) tries on internet identities
for size in a series of hi-tech videos. As far as one can tell from Sam Keogh’s
recordings accompanying his Kapton Cadaverine (2017), Keogh is a man who fell
to earth, the grubby remains of his cellophane-wrapped spaceship blown out of
orbit and now in storage awaiting forensics.
The effect of all this is a kind of captain’s log that
zaps between time-zones. The way the work is spread about GOMA’s civic interior
resembles a film set depicting a twenty-first century dystopia at odds with the
ornate classicism which houses it. Seen together, the works themselves look
plundered by space pirates from the hippy sci-fi age of John Carpenter’s film,
Dark Star, which, like Kapton Cadaverine, up-ended the white room
straight-lines look beloved by space age directors Gerry Anderson and Douglas
Trumbull. But this is all illusion. Only the incongruous totems hanging from
Jessie Darling’s washing lines are defying gravity.
The List, June 2018
ends
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