Visual art and Paul Dale

Francesca Woodman

28 May 2009

Francesca Woodman created a remarkable body of work in her short life (she committed suicide in 1981 at the age of 22), some of which can currently be seen at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art’s Artist Rooms. This beautifully presented…

Boneless Box

16 Apr 2009

Naming their inaugural show at this new gallery space after one of KFC’s advertising campaigns, the curators of Boneless Box have opened their doors to all that is finger lickin’ and artificial. Things start sweetly with Debjani Banerjee’s miniscule…

Hayley Tompkins: Autobuilding

2 Apr 2009

MIXED MEDIA Over the past ten years GSA graduate Tompkins has drawn recognition for her abstract compositions. On the strength of this show, however, hers is an oeuvre that seems to have (to quote American cleric/writer Norman Vincent Peale) been…

Mr Lautner Builds His Dream House

5 Mar 2009

With a new film and major exhibition celebrating his life and work, maverick architect John Lautner’s time may finally have come. Paul Dale looks back at the life of the man who shaped the look of US moviemaking’s hometown.

Urban Reflections

22 Jan 2009

FILM/PHOTOGRAPHY Five artists attempt to answer novelist Jonathan Raban’s call (from his wonderful 1974 book of ‘interdisciplinary’ urban reflections, Soft City) to create a ‘vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the continual creative play of…

Luca Frei

8 Jan 2009

Entrenched in a Dadaist slipstream of playful bemusement, Swiss-born, Swedish-based artist Frei is usually as mad, bad and fun as a bag of rainbow painted spiders. His contrived installations, which have graced cutting edge galleries in Paris, New York…

Close Up

27 Nov 2008

PHOTOGRAPHY/FILM ‘Why has not man a microscopic eye? For the plain reason man is not a fly.’ The early 18th century poet Alexander Pope’s wrote that, perhaps in a moment of peevishness. Between Pope’s witticism and writer and critic William Hazlitt’s…

Richard Forster

13 Nov 2008

DRAWINGS Recalling poet laureate John Masefield’s most famous poem, Sea Fever (‘I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide / Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied’), Untitled (Seascapes), Forster’s first solo…

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…

Return of the Soul - The Nakbah Project

A secret persecution preserved in wax

14 Aug 2008

Scottish based painter, theatre designer and now multimedia artist Jane Frere revisits the Nakbah, the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people in 1948 when the newly UN-sanctioned nation of Israel expropriated ‘lebensraum’ (living room) through…

Sanford Wurmfield: E-Cyclorama

Rainbow in the round

14 Aug 2008

New York based artist Wurmfield’s new creation is a sight to behold. He channels the colour theories of the great Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell by way of Goethe, the Scottish Enlightenment (there is a reason this work is being premiered in the…

Vanity Fair Portraits: Photographs 1913-2008

3 Jul 2008

PHOTOGRAHY National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 21 Sep Any exhibition that begins with an Ashkenazi Jewish songwriter (Irving Berlin) and ends with a sloaney celebrity culture muse (Diana, Princess of Wales) is worth a peek. Following New…

Haptic

3 Jul 2008

DESIGN The Lighthouse, Glasgow, until Mon 29 Sep High design and its pioneering spirit are taken on a Seuss-like tangent in this enjoyable, inventive and very silly exhibition. According to curator Kenya Hara’s notes ‘haptic’ means ‘relating or…

Jo Spence: Self Portraits

19 Jun 2008

PHOTOGRAPHY Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, until Sun 16 Nov Working class artist, photographer, Marxist, feminist, teacher and publisher Jo Spence was an extraordinary talent. Issue-based but always accessible, her work can be seen as the progenitor…