No That Spacial
25th - 31st July
We were delighted to have Jamie and Lewis create and show at the White house and will publish a short description of the artists experience at the white house, here is Jamie's:
I came into the residency with a pretty good knowledge of the Whitehouse Gallery, and knowing that primarily, I wanted to respond to this massive space. There aren't really any other gallery spaces in Glasgow like it, at least not that are accessible to emerging artists anyway. With this in mind, the residency represented an opportunity to explore and develop my work on a much larger scale. Lewis Holleran came on board later on into the residency after Louise Brunjes pulled out, we had this really nice discussion over a few Magners pear ciders about each of our practices and the space itself. From this point on the show really turned into more of a collaborative work. The Whitehouse is an intimidating space to get you head round, for starters its not a traditional gallery in the sense that the walls aren't all whiter than white and there's service pipes everywhere. You have to deal with that as an artist, painting the space was out of the question as we were working with no funding what so ever. With a lot of equipment in the space it just looked like a factory so the obvious answer was to cut back on our work and be super minimal in how we dealt with the show. I had originally planned 3 works for the space and cut this back to just the one based around one of the buildings support columns. This left the rest of the space for Lewis to deal with, installing 2 monitors facing each other on some beat up old plinths. That was it, my work and Lewis's 2 monitors playing these pinging , banging and somewhat disorientating flourescent strip videos facing each other in a western style stand-off, that for me, made an awesome tension in the space. I had been working with balanced objects in the degree show and really wanted to explore this further, but this time even more precarious. I used seven, eight foot strip lights swinging way back on their power cord, pulling down on the buildings column as you can see from the images. I don't think there are many devices that are as good at playing with an environment as light is. The strip lights are all precarious, ready to fall, so they have inherant potential and danger and instability. As an artist, thats what interests me about this work in particular, but more than that, the light is focussed on the ceiling area of the gallery space and casts the floor into shadow, offering up the buildings underbelly for exploration. I like this a lot. Using lights also allows the viewer to participate in the work by walking through the work they interfear with the light and shadow and become players in the interpretation of the work.
VIEW PHOTOGRAPHS
