Sorcha Dallas

Alex Pollard, Joanne Tatham, and Tom O’Sullivan

The artists who represented Scotland at this year’s 51st Venice Biennale (the world’s most important showcase of contemporary art), Alex Pollard, Cathy Wilkes, and Joanne Tatham and tom O’Sullivan, will return to Scotland and stage an exhibition of new works at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh from Dec 8 2005 – March 5 2006. This second exhibiton, ‘Selective Memory: Scotland & Venice Biennale 2005’ will be curated by the same partnership, Jason E Bowman and Rachel Bradley.

Complementary to Selective Memory is an exhibition of works by Alex Pollard and the collaborative partnership Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivian entitled echo echo, also curated by Jason E. Bowman and Rachel Bradley and hosted by the Collective Gallery.

This exhibition continues the ways in which Bowman and Bradley have curated the three selected practices for Venice in Satellite formations across physical and temporal contexts (the Venice Biennale in June, the SNGMA and Collective in December and one final forthcoming phase in 2006). These formations echo, shadow and eclipse each other and are reflective of the ways in which each practice develops its own reflexive structure that create visual languages which it then mines, recycles and repositions.

At the Collective Gallery Alex Pollard will exhibit two new sculptural works ‘Beast’ and ‘Thing’ and a new wall based work that continues his interrogation of self-reflexive communication systems. Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan will exhibit a series of six individual drawings that have not previously been exhibited together. These monochrome illustrations when brought together provide an absurdist adage of their practice – each an archival tableaux of key motifs at play within the self-defined grammer of their practice.

The artists involved in echo echo and Selective Memory emerged from a culture of grassroots, small scale artists initiatives and galleries in Scotland. Echo echo includes the return of Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan to the Collective after collaborating on their forst shoe ‘Blow Your Mind’ at the gallery in 1998 (publication available).

In participating in this project Collective are interested not only in the immediate premise of the exhibition but also in examining the relationship between Scotland’s major cultural institutions and our artist led culture. By engaging a broader audience in awareness of the pivotal role that the dynamic of artist led culture in Scotland has had in supporting artist’s practice at early and crucial stages in their careers we aim to further celebrate these initiatives as being the backbone of Scotland’s vibrant scene.