Garlands/Mineral Park # 2 , Tramway, The Hidden Gardens and the People’s Palace

by Alex Hetherington, 24 Jun 2008

So summer is almost over. Anyway today the Village Voice team take root at the Hidden Gardens in Glasgow’s southside at Tramway to meet the artist Rachel Mimiec and hear about her project Artist Witch, a partners supported residency that she has been working on for two years. She worked with a child psychologist and developed work from a shed/studio in the Gardens, then exhibited the project work at Tramway’s new exhibition space. After lunch we are off to the People’s Palace in the eastend.

Expect a report on all of this soon and perhaps a feature in the next edition of the VV publication.

Garlands is developing and Mineral Park, the video installation and screening is going well: here’s the information –

Mineral Park assembles multiple materials, narratives, video, sound, biography, music, performances and texts that play in and out of sequence and synchronization to generate multiple and differing, evolving experiences from the specifically chosen and researched materials. Alongside this Hetherington has selected a number of international video artists whose work corresponds in different ways to the materials and themes in the show: here he attempts to synchronize his practice to the work of other artists generating further alliances, sequences, disruptions, coincidences, abrasions. The show will be self-generating; the work will change and evolve independently during its installation. (It’s all about language, relationships to information, interpretation.)

The materials used are: the biography of the twins Jennifer and June Gibbons, the notorious sisters who created a secret language and had a pact not to communicate with the outside world; performance footage re-enacting songs by the Cocteau Twins, a band from Grangemoouth who achieved international success with their beautiful and ethereal songs, featuring the singer Elizabeth Fraser who created a difficult to understand language; video footage shot at the Grand Canyon and Mineral Park, a ghost town in Arizona, footage from Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael, California, the one time home of industrialist Robert Dollar; two high energy disco, acid house songs: Voodoo Ray (A Guy Called Gerald) and Let Me think About It (Ida Corr & Fedde Le Grand) and the description of a mid-air plane collision and the language psychology of why gay men speak with a sibilant S.

Alex Hetherington
Anne Colvin
Desirée Holman
John Sebastian Vitale
Lewis Holleran
Lucy Keany
Zefrey Throwell

Lewis Holleran’s powerful video The Cupboard Scene is just amazing and I am glad he has agreed to screen it; Anne Colvin’s The Audition uses found footage from a Godard film and is just so hypnotic, it is less ‘angular’ than her other works; Lucy Keany shows the film she made from her degree show, featuring herself and Missy Malone in an exaggerated positioning of female identities. Holman shows her green-screen dance sequences with troglodytes. I have an array of works by Throwell and Vitale and have yet to decide on the final line-up, I may use it all. Anyway it runs from 9 August to 8 September.

I have been in communication with members of the Cocteau Twins so we’ll see what they have to say soon.

Janie will supply her information soon with images, but I believe she is using slide projections and video in the larger gallery space. She is also a featured artist on Art Review’s web site www.artreview.com (sorry I can’t remember how to tag for links, so just copy and paste)

Fool’s Gold (edited by Lucy Keany and design by Tommy Grace) to appear alongside shows at Gasworks and Matt’s Gallery. I will also have copies to be included in Lucy Keany’s screening at Mineral Park for the show Garlands, in August.