Aurora, Edinburgh – Alberta Whittle and Robin Scott
Collective Gallery, Edinburgh – Lee O’Connor and Rabiya Choudhry.
Edinburgh’s artist-led galleries have been particularly responsive lately to a growing tendency among local artists to fouter with decoration, heraldry and pageantry. In September, the nomadic Aurora exhibited work by Edinburgh artists Alberta Whittle and Robin Scott, celebrating the demise of the spectacular British state. Born in Barbados, Whittle identifies equally with the Scots and African Diasporas. The British state is represented in her work as a memento mori, historical symbols that are still in use yet which fail to incorporate the diversity of the peoples and nations they purportedly represent. Whittle’s alternative heraldry introduces Euro flags, bikini models in monkey masks, butterflies and rampaging T-Rexs into the mix. Scott’s work draws upon the pre-war imperialism that wasn’t quite panelled over by the clean Formica of the Contemporary Style. The social optimism of fifties modernism, the mottled blues, pinks and turquoise Marimekko fabrics, are redeployed in designs taken from the lion and unicorn heraldry found in throughout the 1951 Festival of Britain. Parallels emerge between the failed attempt to re-establish the British state as a consumerist ‘modern’ monarchy that was the Festival of Britain and late attempts by New Labour to gerrymander a New Britain.
At the Collective’s New Work Scotland Programme 12, home-brewed heraldry gets off comparatively lightly in the work of Lee O’Connor and Rabiya Choudhry. O’Connor develops his Scottish imaginary using what he finds around him on a daily basis, an amateur hour aesthetic rendered in the playschool media of tissue paper, coloured crayons and sugar paper. O’Connor parades succinct collage laid out with staple Scots fare scrounged from the Co-op’s bargain bin. They resonate Doric satirist Alexander Scott’s ode to Scotch Optimism: “Through a gless Darkly.” Heart of Midlothian depicts a priest spiting at a sign advertising Lorne sausage (2 for £1.50), mistaking it for the former site of the Tolbooth gaol on Edinburgh’s High Street. In The Real Deal a yellow circle cut from a LiDl plastic bag sets behind a tenement gable end painted with a community mural dedicated to ‘Scotch Pie People’.
The bogus tartanalia of Scottish tabloid culture is so abysmal that it could only be inflicted upon the Scots. O’Connor draws sustenance from this uneasy parochialism, an ersatz-polis of Z-list celebrities taking citizenship in his collaged Republic. Just Joan the Moan, the Daily Record’s immortal Agony Aunt floats above a patchwork Mackintosh quilt in one collage, while another navigates the craggy features of parrot-cut charmer and professional Scotophile Rod Stewart, who sports a carrier from fusty fashion chain Wallis. Stewart endorses a taste for plain-breid, his feathered scarecrow heid echoing the bag design. Banal BBC Sport presenter-come settee salesman Dougie Donnelly makes an appearance, swaggering uncomfortably for the camera in a Stetson. Freddy Mercury, endorsing Radio Costcutter, is the star turn. Being barraged with the greatest hits of Queen while stacking packets of Abernethy biscuits begets the transubstantiation of Mercury. The buck-toothed pigeon struts over us in his trademark ‘wife-beater’ vest, Emperor’s new clothes crafted by O’Connor from a Costcutter poly bag.
O’Connor’s work is complemented by Choudhry’s faux-naif paintings and drawings, scatological representations of her self-image as a lover, daughter, Glaswegian, sister, Pakistani and cook. Choudhry covers the gallery with numerous smaller works painted on cut out boards. Pathetic fallacies personified, they look as if they have wandered into the gallery on their own volition. One, C’est ne pas une joint, a painting in the shape of a joint, has wafted onto the ceiling; another, half-gun half-penis shoots its shot of skull-spunk across a wall while urging us to ‘live in peace.’ In all, they occupy some ground between stoner psychedelia and religious approbation. Choudhry also gives a taster of her polymorphous drawings, incorporating detailed ideographics that are multi-layered and warmly witty. ‘Bismillah’ is written in English on the head of Captain Beefheart skull, one of many dedications which Choudhry writes into her works: “a big massive chunk of love to all my lovely friends and family” […] “and the coffee coloured children” […] “respect and peace” […] “I love you Mammy.”
Two large works compete for attention. Moona Mother Paki Lover frankly celebrates Choudhry’s mother as a divine figure, her six arms gesturing reassurance, charity, adoration and compassion. Sharply observed passages prick these spiritual pretensions with a humour as dry as that found in O’Connor’s work. Choudhry cuts a cross-section through her mother’s stomach to reveal her and her three moustachioed brothers waiting to emerge from the womb. Safety razors fly around shaving hairy legs, one of which appears to be tattooed with the Saltire. The other large painting Brain Deid depicts a banquet held at the ‘Elite Café’ for little devils, an alternate universe to the compassionate communalism represented in Moona Mother Paki Lover. The devils all tuck into large eyeballs, the menu consisting of ‘Ignorance, Hypocrisy, Brutality, Conformity and Submission’. In the manner of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the food laid on the table forms an anthropomorphic menagerie from which evil eyes and jabber jaws peek. A giant knife and fork frame the painting, inviting us to eat her words.
