Inside Out.2
Until December 19; Stills, Edinburgh

These days, information means more to the global economy than material wealth; instant access to the latest Footsie figures can be worth more than a vault of gold nuggets. Valuable information is constantly in flux, under revision all the time, and it’s rarely of much use to anyone but academics when it goes out of date.

The same goes for art. Once, like those gold nuggets, art was guaranteed to be a quantifiable object, usually a painting or a sculpture. Now, caught in the mesh of high-speed information exchange, art is harder to pin down. Artists choose topics and pursue them in a variety of means, and although they might produce videos, drawings, performances or photographs, none might qualify as a finished work of art.

Instead, the process, constantly under revision, might hang in the air like improvised music, never committed to the composer’s page.

In this context, it is increasingly possible for residency programmes – a burgeoning area of the contemporary art industry – to show off their wares. Resident artists may not have finished what they are doing – they may barely have started – but their creative juices can be piped through the gallery space all the same.

At Stills, the second of two such shows is taking place, showcasing the work of the gallery’s resident artists. Residence doesn’t, in this case, mean they live there. They do, however, have access to the gallery’s photographic and digital resources over the course of 18 months.

Most suited amongst these six artists to the fluid model of art-making is Chris Dooks. By piecing together transitory thoughts and contributions, he has succeeded in filling the gallery with his artistic presence. Starting with an enigmatic spiral of text on the front door, he has scattered 20 vinyl texts from his notebooks around the space, including the stairs and the toilet.

They are poetic and humorous. In one, Dooks describes the disappointment of finding that his pilgrimage to The Jewel (in east Edinburgh) would take him nowhere more uplifting than Asda. Another, tucked above a heater, describes “masticated bubblegum corpses…over Waverley’s footbridges”.

Downstairs it all comes together in the Duck Studio, a blacked out room, which is in the artist’s own words “like Russell Crowe’s shed, circa ‘A Beautiful Mind’”. With the giant blackboard and pinned up notes, it’s a bit like being in Dooks’s mind. Most afternoons, the artist sits at his computer, inviting visitors to chill out on the sofa and contribute to his song writing efforts. It will all culminate on December 16 with a performance of the finished songs “and other noise”.

As for finished products, Catherine Devlin’s Imbalance series of photographs is beguiling. Bedraggled whirligigs rise casually from the sea, as if they had always been there, close to shore. The leaning structures, with their dangling ropes, look as natural as fishing nets hung out to dry, and it’s hard to tell whether sea or whirligig has prior claim to the landscape.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 28.11.04