Like many of her local peers, Glasgow artist Katy Dove works with unadorned playschool media. Colouring-in shapes with felt-tip pens and watercolour, she produces the kind of delicate forms and biomorphic sketches last seen alive in the abstract Plexiglas and pinboard animation of the Weimar Republic. The diverse repertoire of forms seem random and unconnected until they are digitally animated and rendered, software ensuring that any hand-made ‘flaws’ appear as integrated patterns. Cutting and pasting her drawings in regular digital formations, Dove amplifies audience attentiveness by giving them rhythm. The limitations of the sound and animation technology at Dove’s disposal are used to her advantage, producing an effect that mimics modernist abstraction’s somewhat clunky and naïve pursuit of unity in diversity. Many of Dove’s early collaged films are optical noise, largely non-narrative and non-naturalistic images set to musical accompaniments that generate a pulse. Infectious and affecting, the right combination of sound and images radically alters the psychological mood. A robotically rhythmic psychedelic procession, Motorhead (2002) forms the video for Glaswegian electro group Devotone. Energy lines, dots and cut-out shapes threaten to coalesce to form facial features, but Devotone’s synth lines ensure that the animation continually mutates allegorythmically.
Melodia (2002) is, in contrast, more lyrical and illustrative while melancholic and sentimental in tone. Exploring the terrain of a painting of a peaceful loch made by her grandfather George Wilson, Melodia is musically accompanied by a segment of Jörg-Maria Zeger’s minimalist guitar composition I Kut. A narrative of sorts emerges as coloured shapes flutter and dance around the watercolour valley like birds in Eden. In the denouement, a rainbow is resurrected from the water, leaving a heart-shaped ripple in its wake. Luna (2004) is more energetically abstract – its jazzy visuals reminiscent of Morris Louis’ Unfurled series of paintings from 1959-61 – a seductive visual response to a homemade soundtrack quietly marrying bird song and church bell’s in echo of Virginia Astley’s classic pastoralia album From Gardens Where We Feel Secure (1983). But not all days are halcyon in Dove’s animated earth. The Rush is more spiky and aggressive, an abstract remix of a film shot from the side window of a car hurtling through the countryside. Like the accompanying music by Lucky Dragons, it is multivalent, jagged, angular and concise. Commissioned by Zenomap, the Scottish section of the 2003 Venice Biennale, You (2003) is a visceral cornucopia of colour. Attended by a repeated sample of the Velvet Underground’s Nico singing the single line ‘you’, this kaleidoscopic cartoon cavalcade becomes a meditative mantra. Dove’s latest film Cruel When Complete – which takes its visual cues from a muted, repetitive and dissonanant 1980 track of the same name by Dome – can be seen at the Pump House Gallery, Battersea Park, London from the 16th February until 10th April 2005.
