Making Connections @GSofA #GraduateShow

The Glasgow School of Art Graduate Degree Show 2015, The Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ, 0141 353 4500; www.gsa.ac.uk
Until Friday 18 September (Monday – Friday 10am – 9pm

I wrote this review for The Herald newspaper and it appeared in its Arts supplement on Saturday 12 September

MOST writers would admit that in the face of a tide of visual overload they tend to look for a common thread.
I’m no exception. It’s a common human trait to find a link which connects you to the art you’re looking at for it work for you as a viewer.
Imagine my delight earlier this week, when I walked into the light towards Victoria Evans intricate creations in Glasgow’s McLellan Galleries and found that actual thread was the vital ingredient which held this complex installation work together,
Harking back to vintage 1970s thread art wall hangings, Evan’s all-white threaded creations are inside glass cases set into white casings. They are spotlit by torches on varying-sized tripods and cast dancing shadows on the white walls which shimmer in the September sunshine. Each work has a loose thread of crimson running through it. It could represent a blood-filled vein or it could simply be a rogue thread. Whatever it is, it sets this work apart from the crowd.
And there is quite a crowd. Victoria is just one of 33 MLitt students from the Glasgow School of Art (GSA) showing work this coming week in the grandiose setting of The McLellan Galleries.
The MLitt students are a single section of a larger showcase which opens its doors to the public today at a number of venues; including the nearby Reid Building, the CCA down the hill on Sauchiehall Street and the Virginia Galleries in the Merchant City.
The GSA’s annual Graduate Degree Show offers an opportunity to view the full range of graduate work undertaken at the world-famous art school. The 2015 show features work by students across a wide variety of disciplines; including architecture, design, and fine art.
This year sees the first graduating cohort of students from the MLitt in Curatorial Practice (Contemporary Art) and they are presenting work in a variety of spaces. Curating has become a necessary tool in the metaphorical napsack of all 21st century artists.
I’ve heard grumbles from older art school graduates about it having a place as an academic discipline, but the art of curation is here to stay. I think it adds to the richly diverse outpouring of work art schools on an annual basis. What is a degree show if not a mass exercise in curation?
For this Graduate Show, students from the inaugural Curatorial Practice programme at have commissioned a new work by Glasgow-based artist, Michael Barr, which is on show at the CCA.
The work combines historical material held in The Third Eye Archive at the CCA with documentation of an off-site performative ‘intervention’, which has taken place in the last few days.
September 2015 marks the 25th anniversary of an artist called Cildo Meireles' failure to make a temporary public artwork in Glasgow during its year as European Capital of Culture.
Meireles was invited to propose a work for the TSWA Four Cities Project in 1990, but his intention to install a model of a typical Glasgow council house in John Street behind the City Chambers was rebuffed by the then Glasgow District Council. Barr acknowledges the anniversary by reimagining Meireles’ proposal while preserving, or even furthering, what he views as the poetic potential of its failure.
Barr’s work at the CCA is one of five curatorial projects that include exhibitions, a mobile screening programme and a library, curated individually by students Ashley Holdsworth, Marcus Jack, Grace Johnston and Rosie O’Grady.
Elsewhere, there are all manner of weird and wonderful creations, as befits any self-respecting degree show.
An image of a mirrored yeti-like creature by Communication Design graduate Laura Thomson has been selected for the show's publicity material. Laura, who was born and raised in Santa Barbara, California, moved to Scotland in 2007 and has recently completed a Master’s degree in Communication Design (photography).
Thomson’s degree show, entitled Senseless, is a photographic project based on anthropological and scientific theories associated with human dislocation from the natural environment and the subsequent dulling of our senses.
At least, Thomson’s shiny yeti-man – on show at the Reid Building – is still standing. Down at the McLellan Galleries, one of the first sights you see when you walk into the gallery space is Haining Liu’s weary willowman languishing on a white wooden chair.
Since seeing him on Monday, I have shared a picture I took on my Facebook and Instagram accounts to indicate my feelings of extreme mental and physical fatigue. (Most notably as Andy Murray stared into the jaws of defeat at the US Open late on Monday night...)
Social media and the modern preoccupation with sharing our thought on screen in ever more vacuous ways features in a couple of very strong installations.
The first caught my ear’s attention the minute I walked into Gallery 4. Sara Alonso Martinez’s The Peep Show of the Heart is an immersive dip into the future. It is 2030 and there are ‘no more selfies because everyone had got rid of the self’. A monotone voice-over tells us he ‘wants to be a voyeur of your heart’ and is underpinned by a rhythmic beating heart. A crudely decorated papier-mâché heart lit up from the inside sits at the centre. The walls are splattered with greyish paint and there's a slate semi-circle at our feet. A large graphic novel-style hand-painted book (which we are invited to leaf through using black gloves) tells the story we are hearing on the audio. I can still hear it now and I’m fretting about the anti-social media world my 11-year-old daughter will inhabit in 15 years time.
Elsewhere, Will Kendrick has also created a noisily neon vision of the future using four screens, a faux-domestic interior and a soundtrack which fuses babbling brooks, spinning classical statues and the superficiality of a Dolce & Gabanna commercial voiced by actress Scarlet Johansen. ‘Music inspires me, art inspires me, but so does the wind...’ This is a witty and pertinent set piece in which we are all unwitting yet complicit voyeurs.