Art

COMING INTO VIEW, PHOTOGRAPHS OF GLASGOW, ERIC WATT, CURATED BY ISOBEL MCDONALD AND ALISON BROWN

Sunday, 3pm. Eric Watt’s collection of selected fragments of city lives in Coming Into View, spanning several decades, an exhibition curated by Isobel McDonald and Alison Brown, today coalesce in the surround-sound of Kelvingrove’s organ recital. In a celebration of both Watt and Glasgow, portraits of ‘St Andrew’s Suspension Bridge’, in the damp of an all-too-familiar smirring rain, and girls with umbrellas traversing glistering tarmacadams, rivers of shining light (‘Kingston Umbrellas, 1960’), segue into street-kids sheltering from a ‘Rainy Day’ and echoey images of the Clyde with its tidal eddies (‘Fairfield’s Yard, 1965’).

Migrations: A field study of adversity

George Lakoff writes of metaphors, understanding and experiencing one thing in terms of another, that they are a form of “embodied thinking”, a discursive tool by which abstract concepts, thoughts and feelings are grasped and understood through the concrete and the everyday. Sometimes addressing traumatic events not directly, but at a slant, defamiliarizes in very insightful ways.  And so it is with Derek Robertson’s thoughtful exhibition, Migrations: A Field Study of Adversity, which employs the conceit of birds migrating—their lines of flight across borders, the dangers attendant on their journeys, their vulnerabilities, and also their will to survive against the odds – to address some of the difficult issues around the plight of refugees from which we, in our comfortable homes, might routinely avert our gaze.

DJCAD Degree Show 2022: Textile Design

Located in the Crawford building, the Textiles corridor warmly welcomes visitors. In front of large open windows, Alexa Gibson’s immersive sculpture Mellow in Yellow invites visitors to stand amongst her brightly designed, hanging textiles. The eight-foot-high pieces of fabric have been mono-printed in various intensities of yellow hues. Natural light cascades into the room and lands on the sheer fabric, activating the electric yellow, radiating a warmth that Van Gogh himself would be envious of. Visitors joyfully walk between the fabric as through trees outside; a moment of contentment usually found outdoors has been brought to life inside.

DJCAD DEGREE SHOW 2022 – FINE ART + ART & PHILOSOPHY

Between the 21st and the 29th of May 2022, we once again come together to celebrate the work of the graduating art students of DJCAD. Each student has created works that inspire and challenge our response to the world around us.

DJCAD Art, Design & Architecture Degree Show 2022

DJCAD Art, Design & Architecture Degree Show 202221 – 29 May 2022 The Duncan of Jordanstone Art, Design and Architecture Degree Show returned amidst much excitement this weekend following a two-year pandemic hiatus. Now accompanied by an online version, this showcase of graduating student talent is staged within DJCAD’s studio and exhibition space, organised into three Read More

DJCAD DEGREE SHOW 2022 – FINE ART

For the first time in two years, DJCAD opens its doors to warmly welcome visitors in-person to their renowned and much anticipated Degree Show. An eclectic showcase of ambitious and exciting bodies of work from this year’s Fine Art graduates. What strikes me most is just how much there is to see. The work is dispersed throughout the college and adjoining Cooper Gallery, and it is easy to spend hours in each area of the building perusing through paintings or immersing yourself in an installation.

DJCAD Degree Show 2022 – Online Showcase

As Dean of School, Professor Anita Taylor points out in the introductory video, this year’s graduates have studied in extraordinary times. Yet by browsing the contributions the constraints of lockdown are quickly forgotten – the quality of work is outstanding, the only evidence of Covid-19’s impact is perhaps an increased presence of social themes in the work, with mental health, isolation, body image, and nature connection all featuring heavily.

A General Practice

“Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown”, Virgina Woolf’s manifesto for a new kind of fiction, starts with a small, seemingly innocuous figure who teases her, “Come and catch me if you can”. A General Practice presents a tableau vivant of brief encounters between doctor and patient in a clinic in the forgotten back streets of an unnamed French city, “tucked away behind a row of bargain shops and fast food outfits”. In its imaginative attentiveness to place, suggestion of character, and its sensitivity to the passing of time, the world that we enter in these pages is luminous with the lives of those forgotten, ignored or made invisible.

At Least This I Know

Andrés N. Ordorica (404Ink, 2022);  pbk, £9.99 What does it mean to belong somewhere? In a body, in a family, in a writing group, in a country? These are the questions that inhabit this debut collection from Andrés N. Ordorica, a queer Latinx poet now based in Edinburgh, having lived in Mexico and the USA. Read More

A Love Letter to Dundee:  Joseph McKenzie Photographs 1964-1987

To shout ‘I love you’ from the rooftops seems such a 70’s thing to do but that’s exactly what one student living in Dundee’s Hawkhill did for his girlfriend around 1970.  Joseph McKenzie (1929-2015) immortalised the romantic gesture in a black and white still that inspired the title for this exhibition. The student painted his Read More