Susan Derges
Ingleby Gallery; until November 8

Hitch
Glasgow Print Studio; until November 8

Susan Derges is a modern alchemist, creating magical moonlit photographs without the use of a camera. Some years ago she discovered that she could create images by placing photographic paper on a riverbed and allowing it to develop by the light of the moon. Frustrated by the limitations of the process, Derges has now built a water-tank in her dark-room, over which she suspends real foliage and onto which she projects her images of moonlit, starry skies. The results are captivating.

Crescent Moon – Star Field – Briars is a typical example. A blurred, buttery crescent moon hovers in the lower quadrant of the tall print, the black briar silhouette reaching up to a star-lit sky which looks like gleaming holes pricked into card (to capture the stars over a long exposure Derges tracked their movement across the sky). A ghostly light clings to the contours of the leaves, and the overall effect is so magical that Tinkerbell might flutter in at any moment.

The beauty of these lyrical images is partly in their making. There is a potent sense of the passage of time, at every level from the tiny seed to the vast constellation, and this is most tangible in Derges most recent works, Star Field – Thistle, and Star Field – Queen Anne’s Lace. Floating above the thistles are dandelion clocks in various states of deshabille, and the Queen Anne’s Lace sheds its star-shaped seed-pods into the night sky.

All of the pictorial players, from the stars to the ripples in the water, and to the twigs that cause them, occupy the same picture plane in a decorative scheme which draws directly from Japanese print-making. With perspectives upended, the viewer sees a few fern leaves and imagines whole forests, and circular ripples in the water look like Disneyesque bubbles in the air.

A quite different atmosphere pervades Glasgow Print Studio’s latest exhibition, Hitch, the work of 12 artists inspired by Hitchcock. Some of the references are plainly obvious, others oblique. Two artists, perhaps predictably, have chosen to play on the complexities of voyeurism invoked by a binocular-wielding James Stewart in Rear Window. Of these, Roberto Gonzalez’s etching, Hitch, stands out as a beautiful study in red, yellow and black, of Stewart’s figure trapped in one half of the composition, the other half an abstract, indeed expressionist, rendering of warped architecture.

J Tobias Anderson, who has previously used Cary Grant films in his work (two entertaining sound pieces were recently on show in Stirling), has condensed North by North West into a rotoscoped animation of about one minute, fast-forwarding through the key scenes at a dizzying rate. To anyone who knows the film (and here I must confess to a lifelong obsession with Mr Grant), this breakneck visual synopsis provokes a sense of instant recognition akin to flicking through the family album.

David Sherry’s Psycho Birds are a typically wry conflation of the two films, and Janice McNabb’s subtle painting, The Bates Motel Tour, brings together the bizarre opposites of a fun day out and a murderous night in, both in the name of mass entertainment. Peter Howson must have mistaken the word Hitch for the word Kitsch and has produced 17 pastel drawings worthy of the worst of Gothic comics, while Steven Campbell has played a blinder with his large acrylic painting, Strangers on a Train, a strong, enigmatic piece of visual theatre with darkly decorative actors.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 12.10.03