Generator in Dundee are profiling the work of dynamic duo Jason Nelson and Kevin Reid in ah-ken-ah-kin! (31st March – 29th April 2007). Recent recipient of the Scottish Arts Council’s Amsterdam Residency, Reid particularly stands out in Scotland for producing unaffected work that is invigorated with good humour and a carnivalesque character. Incorporating elements of performance and pre-school TV style storytelling into his work, Reid experiments with sentiment, friendship and memory in a way that echoes the superhero role-playing and gang-huts of many a grown man’s perpetuated childhood. There’s something of The Broons, Dundee’s kailyard cartoon family perpetually stuck in 1936, lurking in the background here; or perhaps, more accurately of Frank Quietly’s Broons parody The Greens from Glasgow’s adult comic book Electric Soup. It’s not something you see much of in Scotland these days – although once there was little alternative to the antiquated parochialism of The Sunday Post – which makes ah-ken-ah-kin! all the remarkable and worth following.
Arousing its erstwhile audience of Sunday Post readers with a dose of new medication, the curatorial direction of Talbot Rice’s new Director Pat Fisher continues to produce attractive results. Recent large scale solo shows by Lucy McKenzie (touring to the Norwich Gallery and Bristol’s Arnolfini) and Jamie Shovlin have shown the University of Edinburgh gallery take a step in the right direction; it is quickly becoming one of Scotland’s most consistently vital contemporary art spaces. Black Marks, a forthcoming solo show by Glasgow-based Alex Pollard (22nd April –2nd June 2007) promises to be just as ambitious (the self-depreciating literalism of his title is deliberately understated). His first major Scottish show since representing Scotland at the 2005 Venice Biennale, Pollard will be making new works exploring the possibilities of clowning around in the studio through the use of trompe l’oeil devices and opaque allusions to early 1980s New Romanticism. A new range of oil paintings and small bronze medallions will focus on the motif of Pierrot the clown, a naïve bohemian from the Comedia dell’Arte famously revived by David Bowie in Ashes to Ashes (1980).
Pollard’s work will be complemented well at The Embassy in Edinburgh where Toronto-based kinetic sculptor Brandon Vickerd will be exhibiting a series of high-tech installations When All Our Heroes Turn To Ghost… in a major solo show (6th April – 6th May 2007). Vickerd’s work incorporates motorised robotics and emphatic elements that animate his welded-steel forms, creating sculpture with a dramatic sense of entropy and the illusion of organic intelligence. In one work, Champions of Entropy, stag antlers are attached to pneumatic sprung armatures, allowing the dead to do battle from beyond the grave; although in this round they appear to be dancing in time to Detroit techno. There are interesting parallels with Pollard’s fascination with the auto-erotic, the pathetic fallacy and with the production of compositions that make and erase themselves as well as with Reid’s interest in simulated “Heroes”.
