Activities

by Alex Hetherington, 26 Jul 2008

Yorkshire and sometime Glasgow-based artist Cath Whippey came to present her work to a much reduced Village Voice Group this week. She has been teaching at the Glasgow School of Art and I thought it a good opportunity as she’s in town to come to Falkirk and speak about her endearing, startling and occasionally frightening performance projects using masks and interaction with the public. She showed us her mask-making work, her animal heads, the Red Riding Hood project from SSW, Lumsden and an artist-in-residence project with Deveron Arts, Huntly. I like Cath’s combination of traditional sculptural work with her performance interventions and I really liked the mask she showed us with the built-in TV camera with its monitor in a handbag.

Elsewhere I have completed a review on Prices, Cathy Wilkes at the Modern Institute for Matt Roberts’ magazine art art art; this should go live in August. I found in the work she showed interesting relationships to Tracey Emin and Barbara Kruger: I Shop Therefore I Am, etc.

Garlands installs during the week: the little name cards for the artists will appear on Tuesday and I have obtained a scrolling LED sign for some texts, names and materials during the show, I have also taken on a sort of pseudonym for the show: Neon John, a fake character whose traits come to life during this show, an alternative me. It also references works by the late Jason Rhoades. I am also trying to find a suitable material to make the floor temporarily black. It will make the space all the more claustrophobic and intense, two words synonymous with my practice. “Manic”, as Anne Colvin of San Francisco calls me. The brochure for the show arrived too, the day after I ordered the print run, like it materialized from nowhere. These will be freely available at the gallery.

I continue to explore memory loss , this time on a more personal level as my mother went into a diabetic coma last week (including a dramatic break-in to her house by the emergency services) and is now recovering at a stroke unit in Stirling; she remembers nothing from recent history, so strange, to lose information that seems so fundamental to identity, I wonder where this information goes, it is like losing a file when a computer crashes, it just disappears somewhere. Is Jimmy Carter still the President of the US? I guess somewhere in time he is, or Atley the Prime Minister: gone is my father’s name, gone is my mom’s evacuation to Bute during the War, gone is her time in Bodega Bay, California, gone are my cousins’ names.

On a lighter note I have been approached for a feature inclusion in Flit magazine, based in Portland, Oregon, more on this as it develops. Flit is one of those modern homosexual art/culture/skin magazines (PinUps, Butt, Kaiserin, Kink), so adult content only I guess. This comes out in later summer. I am working on a performance for this using signed fan photographs celebrity-style: and in fact this is the second reference to Richard Prince here, I think. Ok goodbye.