Laura Aldridge

Laying down and kissing the love in the mist:Part 2 – Anna Mayer, Neil Bickerton, Kathryn Elkin, Louise Shelley, Jess Flood-Paddock and Caroline Achaintre.
Kendall Koppe, Glasgow
20/01–18/02/2012

Laying down and kissing the love in the mist:Part 2 – Anna Mayer, Neil Bickerton, Kathryn Elkin, Louise Shelley, Jess Flood-Paddock and Caroline Achaintre.
Kendall Koppe, Glasgow
20/01–18/02/2012

Part1: Ree Morton

Part 2: Anna Mayer, Neil Bickerton, Kathryn Elkin, Louise Shelley, Jess Flood-Paddock and Caroline Achaintre.

Curated by Laura Aldridge

I wanted to make a presentation drawing on the art of American artist Ree Morton, whose work and writings about her work I have been invested with over the last several years. Fragments of her writings and her changing emotionally and critically honest relationship to her work have held something of me in them at times. She makes space within the work for her relationship to others and her relationships to places within language to unfold but with a certain hard fought ease or lightness. At the same time the work does not explain itself away, you have to come to it. These are things I admire

Laying down and kissing the love in the mist is an exhibition that takes a performance work made by American artist Ree Morton in 1976 as its starting point. Working in America in the 1960s and 70s, yet developing her own critical and artistic trajectory in relation to structuralist theory, surrealist literature, emotional experience and with her own directness of attitude Ree Morton’s work offers a different framework to much of the contemporary visual art practices taking place within Scotland. Yet her insistence on the intuitive as part of a rigorous and theoretical approach makes her work relevant to current practice that explores spaces within the subjective, and their possible reflection on embedded behavior and habitual relations of knowledge and power.

In order to give the different works their own time, the opportunity of a slowing down for the audience, the exhibition will take place in two parts. The first, a presentation of documentation of Morton’s performance. The second will feature the newly commissioned art works and performance by Anna Mayer, Jess Flood-Paddock, Neil Bickerton, Kathryn Elkin and Louise Shelley, anchored with existing work by Caroline Achaintre. This unfolding over time will allow a sitting alongside, and encourage a reading of the different relationships at work. The showing of Morton’s performance for an audience becomes itself gestural.

The exhibition seeks to develop a creative space where moments within the work of Morton and the participating artists may be expanded and held open as a possibility. Although the featured practices are divergent there is a common thread of making space for relationships to others and relationships to places within language to unfold, of the way these inter-relate. The careful handling of these, often intuitive, relationships is key to the exhibition.