Skip to main content

Icarus at the Forest Gallery, Edinburgh

(originally published by The Student) 

     Walk into Grazyna Dobrzelecka's exhibition in the Forest gallery and you may well think this is just an empty room with the last show's remnants still nailed to the walls. Ten tiny pieces of art trail the bare white walls to the windowsill, where a visitor might end up feeling a little too conspicuous in the wide street-side window.
     Named for the mythical Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun, the exhibition continues Dobrzelecka's interest in birds and flight. His previous showing, Pigeonholes at the ECA, was inspired by the effects humans have on the life of the humble city pigeon. Here his reference to birds specifically is restricted to a single tiny black and white photograph, but themes of freedom and captivity run through each piece, from the 2lb lead weight on one wall to the one-sided chess game on the windowsill, entitled Entrapment.
     Elsewhere, Wing consists of a right-angled triangle of lines, slashed into one blank wall and reminiscent of a prisoner counting out the days of his sentence. This, like the other pieces, stands alone and is absent of explanation or mark on the wall beside it, making the room look like a collection of things found on a beach, especially in the case of the phonebook pages bent to form a wing or a wave.
     But it seems the simplest of the works is the most captivating. The image of the birds, Flight, shows a few birds on a city windowsill, one of which is blurred in tentative flight. It is the bird's shadow which catches the eye- this dense black form plastered onto the side of the building is far more distinct than the animal itself.
     Given a bit of deciphering, this collection of work is interesting in its treatment of the subject. Feathers are incorporated into most pieces, and a stark monochrome makes this little room almost startling in its difference to the cosy dark of the café next door. Dobrzelecka's art makes a modest attempt to reach olympian heights, though it remains to be seen whether he will soar.

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Calgary, Alberta

Yesterday I ran around the city a bit, trying to see as much as possible for as little as possible...      It was hard.      The walk from Sean's place in Renfrew was long but scenic. Cold and crisp, Calgary did turn out to be mostly suburb, with a pretty concentrated centre with all your usual tourist hangouts just south of the Bow river where a lot of money can be spent very easily. Like $14 for going up Calgary Tower, $9 for a student ticket to the Glenbow Museum, and all those malls! They're all interconnected, so you could probably walk from shop to shop most of the way across the city without having to see sunlight. This is probably the idea behind the Plus Fifteen, too- a heated walkway above the streets so the Calgarians don't have to freeze in winter.      The Glenbow offered your normal mix of traditional art, weird modern stuff, rooms full of the extensive and glorious history of Alberta, all 150 years of it,...
Post a Comment
Read more

You Say It Best...

(originally published by The Student )      Watch any western, any black-and-white adventure film, any rags-to-riches adaptation, and you'll realise we've seen this all before. The guy gets the girl, the evil tyrant falls and the True King rises, be it Middle Earth or the Mid-West. We've seen these scenes repeated across time and space, and we know how it goes. Without the speech, the scene still goes the same way. New film The Artist proves this, without saying a word. Aside from the picture-perfect cast and a dog which will reach cult celebrity status any day now, the film addresses the transition between '20s movies and '30s talkies, and a sparse use of sound which offers a challenge to the film-makers.      In one scene, uncharacteristically static, a pair of old friends meet and greet, swap stories, laugh- the details, irrelevant, are replaced by an emotive score and some close camera-work, all of which makes us feel no less connected to the...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Exchanges

     I've also just jumped aboard the Edinburgh Exchanges blog, which contains snippets from students around the world on International or Erasmus exchanges. I do so hoping with all my heart that this will not entail any deadlines. http://edinburghexchanges.wordpress.com/author/jajderian/
Post a Comment
Read more