Edward Weston: Life Work
Until October 24; City Art Centre

Decay
Until August 28; Patriothall Gallery

Cabbages are big in this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival. Frequently name-checked in the Impressionist Gardens exhibition, they become objects of stunning modernist beauty in the City Art Centre’s Edward Weston show.

Filling two floors of the gallery with 117 vintage prints, this survey show constitutes the largest ever UK exhibition of the American photographer’s work. Nude women, sand dunes and vegetables become almost interchangeable in this intense, life-long study of form.

Weston always had an eye for theatrical arrangement, dating back to his beginnings as a Pictorialist photographer, when floral maidens posed in painterly soft focus. Weston soon put this style behind him, turning to the exaggerated angles and hard edges of the Armco steelworks in 1922.

For Weston, industrial sites such as Armco were not an opportunity for social commentary or gritty realism; his eye was always on formal detail. When his peers were documenting the depression of the 1930s, Weston was pursuing the perfect image of a pepper.

Every print which Weston made was elegant, and full of the intensity of a long day’s work. A dazzling shell, cradled in a dark, stoney landscape becomes a luscious cabaret of light, texture and shape. The shell was not found there; it was placed with intent.

The drifting slopes of the Oceano Dunes echo the angled limbs and backs of Weston’s nude models, their legs and arms squeezed tightly into compositions which allow no space for faces. The same expansive light creeps over sand and skin, modelling curves whether fleshy or geological.

Even cabbages and peppers become rich with sensual beauty in Weston’s hands. The whispering sheen of those 1930s peppers is where it all began for Robert Mapplethorpe, and it’s easy to believe you’re looking at the rippling musculature of one of the latter’s male nudes.

Weston was more partial to the female nude, his second wife Charis Wilson his most enduring muse. One day in 1936 she took off her clothes and flung herself down the Oceano Dunes; Weston captured her body, sun-sculpted in the rumpled sand, her legs oddly askew. The pose, the light, the setting are very unreal, like a dream more vivid than experience itself. Far from the poetry of his soft-focussed beginnings, Weston had achieved, without gimmick, the hard-edged poetry of Surrealism.

At Patriothall Gallery, local artists Natalie Taylor and Kevin Dagg have teamed up with Dutch couple Mariëlle van den Bergh and Mels Dees to create a show themed loosely around decay. It’s a two-roomed exhibition of big statements, addressing dark themes with an occasional smile.

Natalie Taylor is growing potatoes in an indoor vegetable plot, the composted topsoil shaped like a pregnant woman. Whether you’re looking at a corpse half-buried, or the beauty of new growth, the message is one of continuity: life, death and regeneration are all part of the same process.

Kevin Dagg has installed an indoor forest of dead trees, complete with forest floor. An oversized carved oak doll sits amongst the trees, chubby cheeks pink, missing a leg. The scenario is alarming, but nothing in the doll’s countenance suggests that it should be.

Mels Dees approaches human disasters with breezy detachment. Varnished wooden wreckage, such as bannisters and picture frames, seems to bob in the gallery’s imaginary waters. The famous cloud from the Challenger disaster becomes a pretty feather in one of several disconcerting photomontages.

Lastly, Mariëlle van den Bergh’s paper dogs are at once cuddly and threatening.  The three muscley mutts are casual but alert, and despite the delicate fragility of paper and felt, one doesn’t feel entirely safe.


Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 22.08.10