Celtic communion
The latest show at the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Art from Glasgow, showcases the work of native artists and the Irish diaspora living in this artistically vibrant city
The title of the current exhibition in Temple Bar Galleries & Studio, Art From Glasgow, is about as unambiguous as it gets. Staged by Irish artist Kevin Kelly, the diverse show appears to be exactly what is says on the tin, bringing together work from six artists currently living and working in Scotland's second city. However, what is surprising is that three of the six participants were born on our own shores.
Glasgow is earning itself an increasing reputation as a cultural centre, providing a more simmering and continuously vibrant artistic scene than the capital Edinburgh, where the focus falls once a year during the festival. By now, many Irish artists have debunked to Scotland seeking out the advantages of this cultural boomtown, which affords the up-and-coming more opportunities to show their work and secure a reputation early in their career – though the situation in Ireland in this respect has progressed enormously in recent years.
Nevertheless, Glasgow is now home to a large ex-pat artistic community from Ireland, many of whom – due to the fact they have spent their careers working in a comfortable exile – have rarely been afforded an exhibition in their own country. Art From Glasgow has been constructed around three of these such artists, with Duncan Campbell, Maria Doyle and David Sherry returning to impress their home audience. And this they do with a heady mix of maturity, wit and humour.
Campbell's 'Wither the novel says I am' brings an aesthetically unusual piece to the exhibition, with the Dublin-born artist firstly constructing a small and angular two-dimensional sculpture upon which he has printed and pasted a poem. The work, produced for this exhibition, is nicely understated and provides another example of Campbell's dexterity across a range of media. Equally understated are Doyle's drawings and sketches, which narrate tales of both a personal and fictitious nature. These elements combine in the drawing where recognisable symbols and imagery find themselves located alongside more intangible motifs.
The three video pieces by Sherry are probably the exhibition's high point. The Becks Futures award nominee undermines familiar everyday circumstances, as he takes us on mini-journeys that explore the everyday and mundane aspects of life. In Looking Through Tom Cruise's Eyes, Sherry cuts out the Hollywood star's glistening peepers from a magazine picture, taping them over his eyelids. The resultant excitement he experiences pokes fun at not only life's routines but at how we perceive the life of pop-cultural idols as brimming with excitement and filled with thrills.
Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan, who have worked collaboratively since 1995, exhibit two works in the exhibition which form part of a larger series called 'This has reached the limit conditions of its own rhetoric'. The duo attempt to create works, often reference-heavy, that question the parameters of art and the nature of conceptual art itself. The two imposing works in the Temple Bar Gallery force the viewer to engage with them as they explore the central motif of the series, which in this case is 'zero'.
The final works in the exhibition are by Stuart Gurden, who has reincarnated Bill Hicks as a babbling formica ant for the piece 'Channelling' in the main gallery space. This attention-grabbing and humorous piece, however, is overshadowed by his other work in the Atrium, called eye-may-mah, which is a well-scripted 10 minute-long film shot in Iceland that takes the mythical tale about Brian Wilson's trip to the northern bleakness of the island back in the 1960s. It is a fitting end to a novel and assorted exhibition.
?More Art from Glasgow continues in the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios until 26 November. www.templebargallery.com