In art, as in life, sometimes it’s good to look – and listen – with no preconceptions.
As someone who looks at a lot of art and attempts to distil it into words for this column, reading information panels on a gallery wall can be off-putting. Especially when it comes to contemporary art…
If I’d read the artist and artwork information outside a new display showing Turner Prize-winning artist Elizabeth Price’s Slow Dans, in the main gallery space of Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), I might have done a swift about-turn. Instead, I hurried in and sat down on a wee bench in the darkness and started to watch Price’s 25-minute cycle of three giant 10-screen videos.
Bradford-born Price was a professional musician in the ’80s with indie pop bands Talulah Gosh and The Carousel. She brings this to the table when it comes to creating her video work, including Turner Prize-winning The Woolworths Choir of 1979. As the screens cranked into life, the gloom lifted and I could just make out the 18th Century neoclassical vaulted ceiling of GoMA overhead.
© UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW PHOTOGRAPHYThe minutes flew past to the extent that it didn’t feel like I’d sat watching video art for almost half an hour.
Slow Dans is made up of three separate video works; Kohl, Felt Tip, and The Teachers. All neon, clicks, typewritten ticker tape, drum, bass and disembodied voices telling odd sci-fi-like tales, it was mesmerising. If you had asked me five minutes after viewing it why it was so good, I might have struggled to explain it. Sometimes art is like that.
My takeaway was that I wanted my adult kids to view it with me so we could talk it through. It felt like being in a deserted nightclub that had been taken over by aliens trying to tell you stories of how the past is seeping into the future.
Slow Dans is in residence at GoMA until May
An exhibition of work by the Glasgow Society Of Women Artists is on show at Maclaurin Art Gallery at Rozelle in Ayr.
Running until March 5, there is a diverse range of artworks on display, most of which are for sale – from painting, to printmaking, photography, jewellery, textiles, ceramics and sculpture.
Works that leap off the wall include Society president Lynn Howarth’s lush pastel paintings, Lesley Banks’ dinky bird houses and Anne Morrison’s smooth yet textured ceramics.
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