Volume: Below the Root
Thursday April 15 – Sunday April 18; Free Gallery, 31 Chisholm Street, Glasgow

Cheyney Thompson and Karla Black
Until April 24; Transmission

Knocking hard, as instructed by the sign on the door, I was this week let into the hairdressing salon where a group of Glasgow photographers called ‘volume’ had set up shop for Real Art Week. Not knowing what to expect, I followed my guide down the stairs into a small but inviting white room, where she left me to enjoy the show.

Although the six recent graduates of Glasgow School of Art habitually show together there is no one strand which links their work. The photographs and video works were presented with great professionalism, the only hiccup occurring when I temporarily mistook the tick-tock of the electricity meter for a soundtrack to the video art.

Barbara Wilson’s video measures her daily and weekly routines with an upbeat montage of personal items, flashing from toothbrush to toast, and deoderant to the contraceptive pill. Beer and fags tend to appear as an alternating pair, and Sundays are signalled by Stella Begg’s horoscope (so we know the artist has good taste in newspapers). It’s a simple, strong idea executed with confident economy and it won’t take long for the ad-men to snap it up.

Betty Meyer’s three black and white photographs echo Vermeer’s window-lit serenity, and in Worship, even boys on their playstation become something special. The two boys, kneeling intently before the game, are in the classic pose of prayer before bedtime. Even though they’re not praying the effect is still calming, and suggests that children are as innocent today as they ever were.

Round the corner at Transmission gallery, local MFA student Karla Black (no relation) shares the space with up and coming New York artist Cheney Thompson. Black has worked in the past with ephemeral domestic materials like tissues and tin foil, and her work here – executed largely in pastel-coloured smears and dollops of vaseline – is no exception. It is a palatable answer to the Viennese Actionists of the 1960s, whose ‘cesspool aesthetics’ involved the violent smearing of bodily substances which were far from pretty in pink.

You Do, possibly the least conspicuous work in the show, is a strip of cellophane stuck to the wall with a thin coating of sherbet-yellow paint. This quiet action by Black has reversed the traditional relationship between paint and canvas, by using the paint as a support rather than a surface decoration.

While Black’s works are deliberately messy, Thompson’s are minutely detailed, but the two artists’ work bounce off each other in a number of ways. Painted onto translucent organza and casting shadows on the wall behind, Thompson’s images are fragile like Black’s, while form plays a key role in both. The 11 framed paintings are details from French painter Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, re-interpreted purely in terms of its formal structure. Pine struts intersect with red bricks, and weathered rags fly from posts. The tragic human element is all but eliminated.

The Raft of the Medusa famously turned the spotlight on the corrupt French state of the early 19th century, and Thompson comments here on American foreign policy. Unfortunately, with criticism this refined (or indeed obscure), there’s not much danger that Bush will get the point.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 11.04.04