New Work Scotland Programme 2011/12
Jack McConville | Ash Reid | Amelia Bywater & Christian Newby

Jack McConville shows a series of figurative paintings exploring the vulnerable borders of the public and private. The figures appear in the setting of the spa, stark and pink against a backdrop much like the odalisques of the 19th century. Abstract masculine figures appear in paintings such as Down the Cooling Room. The artifice of black brush strokes redact and dematerialise the scopophilic gaze of the bathers.    
 
Ash Reid’s exhibition shares McConville’s dialogue between several works. The exhibition is a concept in rotation, moving from one piece to the next sharing subjective information. Reid references hauntology in her statement in Collective’s Mining the Horizon publication, seeming to justify her practice as a whole. Simultaneously being and non-being. Existing within the rhetoric of others.
 
Amelia Bywater & Christian Newby present a film Historic Plays Dissolving Songbook and a publication REBECCA. In the film we survey a series of silent plays. Silence is the vehicle that directs you to use the publication as a character profile and script, so we can imagine what the characters are saying. There is no narrative flow in the publication other than the assertion of several people’s names to indicate different plays.