The City and the Stars

By referencing the line "What should I build or write, against the fall of night?", The City and The Stars is a show that certainly wants to ask some big questions. Coinciding with Edinburgh’s International Science and Film Festivals, Stills Gallery takes its exhibition epithet from the eponymous Arthur C. Clarke sci-fi novel, in which Man’s so-called history is revealed as false.

Initiated by this dystopian conception, the show is a dynamic collaboration of film, photography and installation from three distinct artists who tackle this notion from three very distinct perspectives. Married together, their works seek to highlight the holes located in the constructed fabric of knowledge and beliefs that are so readily assimilated into our contemporary world.

Emma Kay’s work is a direct response to this dilemma; her film The Future From Memory underlines the fundamental flaw of human memory through its inherently unreliable consumption and storage of factual information. What appeals here is the manner in which Kay deals with what potentially could be a rather dry subject; from a Star Wars-esque projection to a world map drawn from memory, her work manages to retain its creativity and avoids a reliance on tedious technological jargon.

Standing awkwardly against the backdrop of Kay’s projection, Craig Mulholland’s silhouetting sculptures constructed from various oratory instruments ostensibly denote function. Yet again, however, the works mirror that of Kay’s through their playfulness, as they are in fact useless as operative pieces of technology. Mulholland dislodges preconceptions through his subversion of these forms; by revealing their dysfunction as nothing more than plastic playthings, he questions our perception of the conflicting vocal powers that are broadcasted to us everyday.

Acting as a frame for what would otherwise be a slightly untidy curation, the photographs by Rut Blees Luxemburg enable a coherent synthesis of display. Her large-scale works challenge the canonical symbol of faith through their subtle distortion of compositional elements via photographic methods such as saturation, scale and subject. Faith in Infrastructure is particularly strong, depicting an inverted image of a church interior. By dislocating the scale in this way Luxemburg removes the potential for an initial comprehension and in turn creates a certain beauty from the viewer’s delayed recognition.

The City and The Stars by no means breaks unknown territories but it is certainly approaching one already familiar through this engaging display; it is perhaps the synergy that has been so well established between the artists which make it so believable.