Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Something Haptic, Glasgow
Reviewed by: Stephanie Vegh
Touching on anything from chocolate bunnies to mutant cheerleaders, the most recent artist editions from Trajectory, publishing alter ego of the Glasgow collective Something Haptic, succeed by the strength of their content rather than relying on the object-based inclinations of Haptic’s own membership. Some of these volumes present pleasing exceptions to this rule, such as Return, a low-fi concertina collaboration between the mother and son team Will and Jane Foster, that is as exceptional for its home-crafted touch – I struggled to find a copy whose Sellotape bindings lacked a faint fingerprint – as for its engaging text and drawings on transitory states via city buses.
A sense of journeying, whether blindly back in time through the excised artefacts of Alex Wilde’s Postcards from Madame Stanley or fantastically forward in Jenny Hermanovich’s spiritualist sci-fi narrative, Entering Space – Factual Stories and Illusions, drives the narrative thrust found in a number of the books, even while distinct approaches set the artists apart. In all these offerings, however, their true strength lies in the artists’ native visual abilities – particularly in Hermanovich’s case, where an otherwise conventional narrative is invigorated by her evocative sketches of utopian monuments to a new world order.
For a seamless blend of story and image, Danny Holcroft’s A-B is a tiny unassuming book in which the dual nature of a drawn line as both vast horizon and simple mark making underlines a refreshingly unpretentious bit of existentialism between two crudely-drawn boys. This child-like quality, reinforced by a surprisingly sharp inquiry into representation and reality, sets Holcroft’s volume apart as the highlight of Trajectory’s latest collection: the perfect companion for a journey to the end of the world; to the horizontal mark partway up the page – wherever you are headed.
Writer detail:
Stephanie Vegh is a Canadian-born artist and writer.
stephanie@vegh.ca
Venue detail:
Something Haptic
141 Bridgegate, GLASGOW G1 5HZ
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