Press

With three of the four Scottish artists who exhibited at this year’s Venice Biennale show, Selective Memory, represented here, Echo Echo serves as a kind of companion show to that currently on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (also named Selective Memory).

Although Echo Echo doesn’t feature huge amounts of work, what is on display possesses a precise and succinct thematic thrust. For instance, Alex Pollard’s sculptures are quirkily designed – he has replicated paint brush stems and wooden rulers in plaster, in order to create seemingly slapdash but in reality lovingly designed portraits and creatures.

Yet within his Portrait Of An Artist ( a silhouette of himself composed of fake paint brushes), Beast (the imaginary ruler frame of a brontosaurus), and Thing (more fake paint brushes, assembled into a disembodied ‘arm’ and jointed by balls of gaffer tape), he prods that part of our imagination that sees life in inanimate objects. It’s part Fantasia, part Ray Harryhausen, in other words.

Similarly, the work by Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, in partnership, is short but sweet. Or rather, the work they have conceptualised and commissioned from artist Simon Mansfield – a series of mildly surreal pencil drawings featuring Mr Benn-like Victorian cartoon characters engaged in mildly preposterous tasks which challenge us to divine the logic of their fictional world.