ANYONE who has been on the degree show circuit for the past month will have seen a great deal of work by now. They will also have seen a variety of approaches to showing work: find-your-way-round-the-art-school versus moving the whole jamboree to a b
rand new building (Dundee); the mixing-up of disciplines (Glasgow); the challenge of erratic labelling (thank you, Edinburgh, the MA in particular).
There is also a marked contrast in how the different institutions pave the way for the viewer. If Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen is at one end of that spectrum – requiring every student to provide a statement with their work – Glasgow's MFA Show is surely at the other.
This course's pedigree is not in doubt. It is famously international and inter-disciplinary, marked out by a separate degree show in Tramway. Glasgow's art scene is full of its alumni. Yet, however thoughtfully installed and carefully labelled the show is, the audience is poorer for having no information about these 29 students beyond what we can glean from what we see.
Of course, there is a point at which the work should speak for itself, but these pieces represent an end point of months, perhaps years, of practice, yet we know nothing about the concerns that shaped them. There is an important difference between explaining the work – which risks reducing its impact – and providing the viewer with ways in.
There are several impressive bodies of work here, which range across different disciplines: Or Kadar, for instance, shows three framed drawing-collages, a realist bronze sculpture of two men (a soldier, perhaps, contemplating a fallen comrade) and a lifesize model of a well cast in caramel, which is melting sweetly on warm days. Yet we know nothing about what connects these in the artist's mind, or how they interact with one another.
Much of the work here is mature and interesting, and the range alone is impressive – there are very few commonalities. Three very different films now inhabit the installation built for Phil Collins a couple of months ago: Anna Henson's elegant, moody figures unwind their abstract narrative to cello music; Maayke Schurer's fantasy landscape, made in part from scraps of paper, swirls and roils with dramatic weather systems; Shelly Nadashi's Yellow Exercise appears to be the filmic equivalent of the monochrome painting.
Several students work in large-scale sculpture: Ian Ramsay's GPS is a spiral staircase which tapers to nothing at both ends, Theodoros Stamatogiannis's work features an immense cross-section of concrete piping, while Risa Tsunegi's Girder balances, seemingly impossibly, on a diagonal without any apparent means of support, an elegant piece of minimalism.
Ufuk Gueray makes big, vigorous oil paintings, sculpting the paint and adding glitter and Band-Aids to create an explosive sense of energy and speed. Almost at the opposite end of the scale, Anna Tanner produces small, delicate oils and painstakingly tiny scale models of rooms and landscapes, real and imagined.
Matt Collier makes beautiful pen drawings on scrolls of paper which take their starting points from organic forms and a sculptural piece involving a stuffed crow (thou shalt not have a degree show in 2009 without at least one piece of taxidermy). Ben Rush creates work using archive photographs, radio transmitters and steel tubing referencing the Apollo space capsule, while Michelle Hannah's billboard-size image could be trailing a science-fiction film.
Corin Sworn's 20-minute film After School Special, about ghost towns and teen vandalism in North America in the 1970s, is a clever combination of historic documentary footage, actors' voices and film-making technique. Meanwhile, Jack McLean does a good job of imagining what would happen if he burned down the art school – as well as explaining exactly how he'd do it – with an installation, animation and an immense drawing.
Meanwhile, nine students from Edinburgh College of Art's equally international MA in Contemporary Art Theory have curated Grey Matter at the Talbot Rice Gallery. In practical terms, it's a triumph of teamwork, creating a show which has a broad enough theme to allow interesting divergence, yet is clear enough to unite disparate works. With a podcast, publication, website and reading corner, the audience is more in danger of having too much information than too little.
A key starting point is two seminal works of video art from the 1970s, David Hall's This a television receiver which gradually deconstructs the face and voice of stalwart newsreader Richard Baker, forcing us to question how we perceive what we see on TV. Peter Donebauer's more abstract Entering, which he has described as an allegory of birth, is a multi-sensory experience with its dreamy sequences and throbbing colours.
Alongside these, they have selected various works made in the past few years that deal with issues of sensory perception and the sinister within the mundane: Emma Hamilton's photographs where the flowers in the elaborate arrangements are made of fresh meat; Dan Rees's Happiness is a white wall, where visitors are invited to use a glass to listen to the sounds of a party filtering through from the next room; Clara Ursitti's I BO OK?, an installation in which three computers hold an awkward conversation about body odour.
Johannes Sailor's Good Morning… in a tenement block features an ordinary breakfast (milk, Cheerios) laid out on a sinister contraption which resembles a hospital trolley bed. And when you enter the main door, Littlewhitehead's Snap faces you: a battalion of traps, too large for most vermin, while the same artist's Sentient Orbs floats above your head, both sinister and comical.
Some of these choices seem more pertinent than others, but the budding curators are to be congratulated on looking beyond the obvious, thinking their way around the problems which arose and finding interesting ways to ask perennial questions. Like the one Steve Bishop asks in the title of a sculpture made of striplights and pillowcases: What if everything is an illusion, and nothing exists? You'll need your grey matter for that one.
• The Glasgow MFA show runs until Sunday, Grey Matter until 4 July
The full article contains 1043 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
