Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Reviewed by: Susannah Thompson
Video works rarely entice you to watch the whole thing. Graham Fagen's Radio Roselle, in contrast, is one you want to keep watching. In a darkened, chair-lined room – more club mock-up than gallery space – a large screen depicts a DJ ensconced in his mid-Atlantic pirate radio station.
Using a soundtrack of Burns' poetry and Jamaican reggae along with strategically placed props, Fagen explores the seemingly tenuous (but intriguing) links between Scotland and the Caribbean, tapping into notions of cultural and personal identity. Roselle (as in Radio Roselle ) refers to the name of the ship in which Burns intended to travel from the Clyde to Jamaica in 1786. By association, a history of slavery and imperialist oppression unites the two countries (along with trade and industry links – sugar and shipbuilding). But while Fagen's view of Scotland is politically post-colonial it is also nostalgic: his own childhood acts as catalyst for his cross-cultural examination. The trump card of Radio Roselle – and the exhibition as a whole – is the DJ's hammy performance. There's more than a whiff of The Office's David Brent in the stylised swaying/smoking/swigging – cultural identity aside, this is fantastic observational comedy.
In the gallery above, Victoria Morton's Pleasure and Practice ('an unsynchronised composition') takes a more John Cage approach. In a small room bathed in a yellow-green light, silence suddenly gives way to an array of discordant, disjointed noises, intermittently spaced. This fragmentary style of composition continues in her painting. In subject matter Morton is unashamedly old-fashioned and Romantic, attempting to convey 'inner landscapes' and to encapsulate the viewer in a synaesthetic vortex of colour, an effect heightened by the sculptural quality of several, large-scale freestanding works. But what at first seems little more than a pastiche of High Modernism's stream-of-consciousness – process-based painting – Morton's work treads an ambitiously fine line between voguish high fashion and old-school formalism.
Writer detail:
SUSANNAH THOMPSON
is exhibitions assistant at Glasgow School of Art
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