Aura A: Dalziel + Scullion
Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow, until August 23

Past Standing
The Changing Room, Stirling, until August 23

Picture a diamond-blue iceberg floating in still water, the piercing Scandinavian light throwing dramatic shadows around its monumental form. Then imagine, as its photographic twin, three enormous hulks of felled cedar trunk, three times taller in diameter than the 19th century men who cut the tree down. The proud sawyers look dwarfed and pathetic, while the massive cedar blocks echo the chiaroscuroed elegance of the melting glaciers to their left.

This large-scale photographic print, Sawyers, is one of four by Dundee-based artists Matthew Dalziel and Louise Scullion, best known by commuters for their friendly M8-side horn. Man’s reckless and naïve destruction of nature is brought home in three horrifically beautiful turn of the century photographs, which at the same time reveal how small and silly we humans really are. These archive shots are astutely partnered with Dalziel and Scullion’s own colour-saturated photographs of unspoiled landscape, each a vague and unsettling visual echo of its sepia partner, leaving the viewer with no doubt that nature should endure, but with a terrible fear that man will continue to wreak havoc.

The prints are elegant and understated, and the themes explored are complex and multi-faceted. The artists’ video work, In the Open Sea, combines the infinite beauty of untamed nature with the disappointment of finding that someone got there before you and has in fact tamed it after all. After everything you’ve seen, the words ‘The End’ seem acutely portentous.

Nostalgia of a much less ominous variety is the theme of Past Standing in Stirling. 13 emerging artists from Scotland and beyond respond to the theme of souvenirs and mementos, although one does wonder, given that some of the artists were born in the 1980s, what on earth they can be nostalgic about.

Glasgow-based Hugh Watt’s DVD, Vapour, provides a subtle backdrop for the show: looking like a window through the gallery wall, slushy rain hammers on the glass, building up until the landscape beyond is obscured, while the wintry audio quietly gusts and spits. This could be the memory of a stormy caravan holiday or a childhood window, and is certainly an experience familiar to any Scot.

Magnus Lawrie’s installation, construction/reconstruction, plays on aspects of memory, and reconstructed realities. The corner of the gallery plays host to a woodchip box (wood reformed into wood) and a line spray-painted on the wall. The corner of the floor is chipped away, and just visible through the hole is a photograph of the same scene, seemingly somewhere else, with a slightly different line, and no hole in the floor. Past reality is literally blowing a hole in its own reconstruction.

Jenny Hogarth’s Gelatine Figure is a Venus de Milo made of pure jelly in a cheap shell-shaped ashtray, slumped gracelessly against the gallery wall. The beautifully cast figure is like a dreamed memory of great classical art, reminiscent of Dali’s limp watches and a warning that we can no longer appreciate those icons of art which are ubiquitous now as kitsch keepsakes.

The modern white gallery walls of The Changing Room make a perfect foil for this subject, standing proud from the old cream cornices and water pipes of the original room, which are an insistent memory of the building’s own past.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 27.07.03