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
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