Richard Wright
Until October 17; The Modern Institute

Julie Read: Superficial or Inherent
Until October 11; Street Level Photoworks

If Paul Klee took a line for a walk, then Richard Wright takes squads of them for aerobic workouts. Famous for his intricate wall paintings, Glasgow-based Wright is represented by The Modern Institute, host to his latest solo show. The exhibition is a modest affair, occupying the main gallery space, the library and the back office, with seven silk-screen posters, two framed paintings and one substantial wall painting.

Wright’s predilection for untitled, site-specific artworks, straddling the divide between painting and installation, has gained him international recognition, and his mesmerising ornamentation of the Modern Institute adds to that collective body of work, all of which is eventually subsumed by iconoclastic coats of gallery emulsion. Typically for the artist, he has chosen a space high up on the wall which is complicated by utilitarian aspects of the room’s architecture, and he has incorporated these, and their shadows – real or imagined – into the painting.

The grid-like patterns of lines and circles are highly structured, but within them there are seemingly random patterns, informed by the space and light of the room and creating the sense – like jumbled ascii text – that there is coded meaning in this pictographic jungle.

Wright sees his wall paintings as improvised live performances, responding to the circumstances of the day, resisting commodification, and ultimately gone without a trace. Why, then, has he filled the rest of the gallery with posters which he has made and duplicated elsewhere, and with framed paintings? Although these contain many of the successful visual elements of Wright’s style, they are a conceptual own goal and suggest that the realities of the art world may finally have caught up with the artist.

At Streetlevel Photoworks, Edinburgh-based artist Julie Read takes us back to the womb to explore issues of identity, isolation and classification with a wonderfully light touch. Nine enlarged photographs of skin tell us very little about the people depicted, except that there is a word impressed on each which provides a bare bureaucratic fact about the skin’s owner: the colour of their eyes, their weight, or their date of birth.

On the opposite wall, hung at belly-button height, is a further series of digital prints called O.S. Forms. These, like Ordnance Survey maps, chart the topography of eight individuals’ navels, gradated in colour according to depth. Created through a methodical process of casting and measuring, the images say little about each individual, while focussing attention on a fundamental, and much-neglected part of the body; we are rarely reminded that we were once physically attached by a tube to another human being, safe inside them.

We are further reminded of our foetal origins in the adjacent space, which is pitch dark but for two expanding and contracting navel ‘maps’, projected on opposite walls in rhythm with amplified heavy breathing. Instead of being outside the navels, the claustrophobic darkness and sound create a sense of being safe inside the womb. Read has missed a trick, however, by animating the shifting navels only in the most basic sense – it would have been entrancing to see their contours subtly change shape, frame by frame.

By homing in on our old, now defunct, physical connection point, Read highlights the isolation of the human condition, each one of us clamped into a global system of classification which imprints its priorities on us like branded cattle.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 21.09.03