Collective Gallery: New Work Scotland Programme

New Work Scotland is back again at the Collective Gallery!

Every year the Gallery on Cockburn Street instils a much needed competitive edge into recent Scottish art college graduates by providing a four month support period for four successful applicants. The support comes in the form of a commissioning fee, exhibition platform and the pleasure of being critically written about by an incumbent New-Writing-Scotland-Writer. New Writing Scotland is the same idea as New Work Scotland but it is interested in the promotion of creative and critical writing within the visual arts rather than the promotion of art within the visual arts.

The artists on show - Shelly Nadashi and Jacob Kerray - are recent graduates from Glasgow School of Art. Indeed another NWSP artist – Nicolas Party who is exhibiting in the next calendar exhibition – is a Glasgow graduate. A coup for the GSA over ECA (Edinburgh), Gray’s (Aberdeen) and Duncan of Jordonstone (Dundee)!

Nadashi’s and Kerray’s work are formally very different from one another. Nadashi’s interests are in theatrical audience/performer relationships. In the exhibition’s blurb there is pretence at breaking down theatrical separation and freeing the audience from spectacle. Despite the funny colloquial ad-hoc stage sets there is a pedanticism to the work which prevents it from eliciting more than a distracted consumption of its post-spectacle.

Ad-hoc and then some baroque: Kerray’s paintings are fictional mash-up portraits of sci-fi footballers in a Baroque-cum-Philip Guston vernacular. His paintings generate a parallel dimension of a football freak culture. This is represented in a salon of hypothetical football icons and hyper-statistics from a hypothetical World Cup. It is funny and the a-little-bit-careful-and-then-a-little-bit-rushed painting style is cute.

It is what it is: A fun show chronicling the diverse work coming out of Glasgow School of Art!