Exhibitions

Venue: The Changing Room, Stirling

Dates: 6th July–11th August 2007

Preview: 5th July 2007, 6pm

Notes: with Gregor Wright

Tender Scene is a group exhibition of work by four artists organised as a collaborative installation rather than a presentation of individual works.

The artists share a concern with oblique references to melancholia and notions of the Gothic. Invented theatrical characters and awkward archetypes rendered in paint talk to each other across a graphic wattle and daub.

The ideas which drive Fiona Jardine’s work draw parallels between the literature and art of pre-Enlightenment Europe and that of modernity, alluding obliquely to a notion that certain traits of medievalism characterise contemporary politics, cultural output and social organisation. Her photographs in Tender Scene feature a character developed with these ideas in mind, a cabbalistic figure which is sculptural, rather than emotive or directly expressive.

Alex Pollard has made three new paintings that use a grey visual argot. Melancholic jesters and polymorphous forms shape themselves from distorted cosmetics, drawing inspiration from Italian mannerist painting and gothic figurative alphabets as well as subcultural graffiti idioms. The distorted cosmetics move from the representation of symbols to vaguely anthropomorphic profiles, developing portraits of eccentricity that celebrate the fantastical and the marvellous.

Clare Stephenson’s drawings are part of a series of works featuring two ‘existential’ drag queens, Miss Verily-Existent and Miss Quite-Transcendent. The two figures are taken from collages composed of repeated elements from medieval painted wooden church sculptures. Through their deliberate theatrical gestures they pose questions on essentialism, base materiality and transcendence.

Gregor Wright’s paintings and sculpture stare back at the viewer through the holes in meaning opened up by a working practice that deliberately generates incomplete information.

Fiona Jardine was born in Galashields in 1970. She gained a BA (Hons) Fine Art from Duncan of Jordanstone, Dundee in 1998 and a MFA from Glasgow School of Art in 2003. Recent exhibitions include Moltke’s Eye, Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow; How to do white, Tramway, Glasgow (with Hannah Hewetson and Lisa Gallacher), Sweeney (solo) at Intermedia Gallery, Glasgow in 2005 and the group exhibitions April is the Cruellest Month, Transmission, Glasgow and Madame la Baronne at Centre d’art Mira Phalaina / Maison Poulaire, Montreuil, France, both 2006. Jardine has just completed a residency at The Pumphouse Gallery, London.

Born in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 1972, Clare Stephenson graduated with a BA in Sculpture from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee in 1996 before serving on Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery committee. Stephenson has exhibited in group shows in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Tyneside, London, Malmö, Madrid, Berlin and Buffalo and in solo shows at Glasgow’s Bulkhead and Transmission and Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice. She had a two person exhibition at The Changing Room in 1999 with Kevin Hutcheson.

Born in Brighton in 1977, Alex Pollard graduated with a BA in Painting from Glasgow School of Art in 1999 before serving on Glasgow’s Transmission Gallery committee between 2000–2002. In 2001 he began a year-long residency at Glasgow School of Art from which there was produced a publication including essays by David Musgrave and Neil Mulholland. Recent solo exhibitions include Black Marks, Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, 2007, Torch Sculptures, Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow, 2006; Disintegrating Hand and Other Works, The Reliance, London, as well as recent projects spanning See-Through Mask, with Sorcha Dallas (off site project) in May 2004 and a Basel Art Fair Statement in June 2004. A recent prize-winner at The John Moore’s Painting Prize 2004 he was included in Aperto Scotland at the Prague Biennale 2003 and was selected for East International, Norwich in 2003. Pollard is one of the four selected artists who represented Scotland at The Venice Biennale 2005.

Gregor Wright is interested in the concept of information and the ways that it is transmitted. His work is an attempt to understand visual information and the language that carries it in terms of their relationship to the increasingly abstract forms (data) that exist in wider contemporary culture. His approach can be seen as an attempt to strike a balance between an additive and a subtractive process. Through the constant acquisition and subsequent stripping out of information, both visual and conceptual, the work becomes an investigation into how meaning constructs itself. Formally the work exists in the gap between figuration and abstraction, focusing on the incongruent, the banal and the darkly surreal. Gregor Wright was born in Kilmarnock in 1975 and graduated from Glasgow School of Art (Painting) in 2001.

Fiona Jardine, Alex Pollard and Clare Stephenson are represented by Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow.