VISIONS FOR THE FUTURE, Scotland’s pre-eminent exhibition series of leading Scottish artists looks to the cultural identikit installations of Graham Fagen and the kinetic painting of Victoria Morton. The Glasgow-based artists are the fourth pair of young Scottish artists to exhibit individually in
Visions For The Future IV, 30 November 2002 – 11 January 2003, having produced significant work of considerable recognition in recent years.
Graham Fagen’s work tackles contemporary identity and its associated myths and fictions with vibrant pop cultural leanings. Working with video, photography and installation, Fagen, born in 1966, uses a particular combination of sculpture and language to explore personal and cultural influences on the individual. Suggesting fiction, his work nevertheless deals with social, cultural and historical accuracies.
The commission for Visions, installed in The Fruitmarket’s lower gallery, comprises three new works.
The first, Radio Roselle, 2002, is a free-standing installation and video work that examines connections between Scotland and Jamaica, fusing traditional Scottish music with historical reggae songs while employing Robert Burns as a catalyst. The historical link drives the narrative for an installation examining cultural identity. Fagen has also created a bronze cast sculpture, Where The Heart Is, 2002, in the form of a rose bush, originally the inspiration for a public art parks project for Glasgow’s Royston Road.
Fagen has exhibited widely in Glasgow, London, Belfast, Leeds, Vancouver Canada, Perpignan France, Venice, New York, Christchurch New Zealand, Darmstadt Germany, and Milan. His work is featured in private collections and collections of Hayward Gallery, Imperial War Museum and Royal Armouries.
Victoria Morton, born in 1971, is an innovative painter working with music and sculpture who explores the historical development of painting, in both intimate and epic scale works brimming with movement and Cézanne-like colour. Taking the idea of musical composition, Morton constructs work as self-contained life forms with the focus on the process of change and coming into being.
Described by the artist as arrangements of conscious and unconscious thought and action with contemporary influences – ‘inner landscapes,’ Morton’s commission, installed in the upper gallery, affords opportunities for the viewer to place themselves as figures in the work. The canvas is ‘the point where inner thought and the outside world meet, ’ she says. More experimental elements of sculpture and music will feature in this context.
Morton has exhibited in Glasgow, Orkney, Aberdeen, London, Belfast, Toronto, Frankfurt and Stockholm and is also part of artists’ group Elizabeth go, creator of collaborative installations, recordings, films and performance. Her work is held in collections in the UK, Europe and USA.
The Visions IV exhibition, will be accompanied by major new solo publications of the artists’ work, available from The Fruitmarket Bookshop from 20 December.
The Visions For The Future series is at mid-stage, part of a four-year project instigated in 1999 that commissions and showcases the work of leading Scottish artistic talent, and has often toured throughout the UK and internationally. Previously Ross Sinclair and Martin Boyce (September-November 1999), Anne Bevan and Graeme Todd (February – April 2000) and Annette Heyer and Steve Hollingsworth (October – November 2000) have exhibited in the series.
Visions artists are at the stage of emerging from lauded major group, and smaller solo, exhibitions to unleash more complex work of international standing that can be measured as new artistic benchmarks for Scottish visual art practice. The selection panel includes previous Visions artists, and representatives from Duncan Jordanstone College of Art and Design, British Council Scotland, Edinburgh College of Art and The Fruitmarket Gallery.
IMAGE:
Victoria Morton,
Snowball and Ice, 2001
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