Visual art and Issue 611

Tea-leafs ahoy!

21 Aug 2008

Rumours abound that a Tracey Emin polaroid was pinched from the Gilded Balloon Loft Bar, last week. The untitled display of ten self-portraits, consisting of enlarged Polaroids of the artist were hung up by pieces of velcro in the bar. Now only nine…

Chad McCail

Puberty, print, perversion and compulsory education

21 Aug 2008

What a remarkable and strange artist Chad McCail is. By his own admission half of his output tends to be peopled by ‘robots, zombies or wealthy parasites’, while the other half looks like loose leaves from a particularly perverse Ladybird book. Both…

Jo Spence: Self Portraits

21 Aug 2008

She may not be a household name, but the influence of Jo Spence, who died in 1992 from complications arising from leukaemia can be found in work by the likes of Cindy Sherman and Tracey Emin. This small but powerful retrospective includes works from…

Treasure Hunt

Rosalie Doubal leads a team around the city on a scavenger hunt in the name of art

21 Aug 2008

9am City Art Centre Equipped with a bike, a laptop, a compass, eight sandwiches and some anoraks, my team – a dyspraxic researcher, a father-of-one, a diehard Buckfast drinker and a token ginger – joins a long queue of eager scavengers. Neither the…

Kate Davis

Outside interests

21 Aug 2008

This is the first time that New Zealand-born, Glasgow-educated artist Kate Davis has returned for a second exhibition within the same gallery space, and she’s eager that her latest show takes advantage of the fact. Where the original show with Sorcha…

The Embassy: Mutatis Mutandis

Good work, bad show

21 Aug 2008

When the Embassy emerged several years ago, it was as a playful, bright-eyed young gallery with a serious interest in art, as demonstrated by the strong exhibition programme. It seemed as though Edinburgh was finally going to get an ambitious artist-run…

Alexander Heim: Doves

Harnessing pigeon power

21 Aug 2008

Lyrical and sophisticated, young German artist Alexander Heim’s first solo UK show exhibits a fascinating lightness of touch. Doves pivots around a video of pigeons at a London Costa Coffee branch. Exquisitely-composed photographs of fragments of…

Hitlist: Visual Art

21 Aug 2008

Return of the Soul: The Nakbah Project Remarkable installation of massed, suspended wax figures, commemorating the violent ethnic cleansing of thousands of Palestinian people after the 1948 establishment of the Israeli state. WASPS, Patriothall…

Hugh Brady: 39

Thought-provoking installation art

21 Aug 2008

The venue for this exhibition is Brady’s studio: a converted stable, which visually correlates to the photographer’s studio in Michelangelo Antonioni’s classic 1960s film Blow Up. From the starting point of the 39 on the exterior door, this is a…

Sculpture Diaries

21 Aug 2008

DOCUMENTARY Dead Ringers once made a big impersonating deal of the rivalry between TV historians Simon Schama and David Starkey. Maybe one day we’ll see small screen art guys Waldemar Januszczak and Matthew Collings doing some doppelganger bitching…

Dovecot: Weaving Influences

21 Aug 2008

An appreciation of the historic art of tapestry is not strictly necessary to enjoy this, one of two shows launching Dovecot as a new exhibiting space for art, craft and design. The twist here is that all the works were designed by leading modern artists…