Had a free hour so I thought I’d leave the conference for a bit and pop over to the Gallery of Modern Art. And very glad am I that I did so.
Jim Lambie had an exhibition of new work in the main gallery called “Forever Changes”. It was eight new sculptures on a floor installation – a load of curved lines called “The Strokes”. Keeping up the music theme, my favourite work was a sculture called “Sonic Reduced” – eight concrete squares with records embedded into them so you could see the edge of the sleeves. Not only were they visually impressive in the way that they have been placed so as to look embedded into the gallery floor, it was pretty good fun looking at the sleeves to spot which records my parents had when I was growing up. It was also quite a shock to find out that Lambie has used collaged eyes in his work for years. Although, its always nice when I can set an element of my work into some kind of real art world setting.
What else was good? Well, I really liked Chad McCails paintings that were designed to look like illustrations from children’s books – although i thought they looked more like those 80’s posters you’d get in school telling you to use the Green Cross Code. I was also surprised to find that I liked Martin Boyce’s “Our Love is Like the Earth, the Sun, the Trees and the Birth”. I say surprised because its got a number of things I’m normally unmoved by in artistic work – sculptures using light bars, installation placement, etc – but I found it to actually be quite moving. Good god, I’m a ponce.
Anyway, there was some other stuff in there but it didn’t appeal to me in the same way. Jo Spence’s photographs are probably worth seeing, although there was only a couple that I found either emotionally moving or ironically funny (although that said I did laugh out loud at one of them).
I took some photos so I’ll post them on the blog when I get home from the conference. Anyway, better get back to it. Got to write up some stuff from an earlier session and then help prep a presentation for the AGM on Wednesday. No rest for the wicked.
Tags: Glasgow, Jim Lambie, Modern Art, Sculpture
