July — Sept 2015 Guide Exhibitions/Events/Walks/Off-Site/Open-Air Café
Beatrice Gibson
Crippled Symmetries Admission Free 30.07.15 – 04.10.15
Beatrice Gibson, Crippled Symmetries, 2015, 16 mm and DV transferred to HD, sound (surround). Courtesy of the Laura Bartlett Gallery and LUX, London.
About Collective
MILK Open-Air Café
Collective was established in 1984 to support the production of new art in Edinburgh. In 2013 we moved to Calton Hill to redevelop the City Observatory complex. Our vision is to become a new kind of City Observatory for Edinburgh, a space in which practitioners, producers and publics can meet, think, debate, reflect upon the past and take action.
Collective has an open-air café run by MILK The seasonally changing menu is freshly prepared using only natural ingredients. Now serving hot soup and toasted sandwiches. Open during gallery opening hours every week.
Open:
Lunchtime Meal Deal Each Wednesday at 1pm we have a new £5 lunch deal – coffee + a sandwich from MILK café and a gallery tour by Collective staff.
August only: Monday to Sunday 10am – 6pm
To make a donation by text: You can give £1, £2, £3, £4, £5 or £10. Example: text COLL38 £ followed by the amount you would like to donate to 70070.
Tuesday to Sunday October – March 10am – 4pm April – September 10am – 5pm
Follow us on facebook Find us on twitter @1984_collective 44 (0) 131 556 1264 mail@collectivegallery.net www.collectivegallery.net +
Design: Graphical House
France-Lise McGurn, acid face (girl) detail, oil on board, 37x 30mm, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.
Collective is redeveloping the whole City Observatory complex as the gallery’s new home, conserving and reinstating the original Playfair designs and creating a new-build gallery space and restaurant. The entire site will be freely open and accessible to the public for the first time in its history.
Observers’ Walks is a series of downloadable audio guides specially created by artists to be listened to on Calton Hill.
Ruth Ewan Print Editions Collective is pleased to present three wood-block print editions by Ruth Ewan. The prints have been informed and developed from the research undertaken for the Memorialmania Obsevers' Walks, produced in collaboration with Astrid Johnston. Each print is an edition of 20 by Robert Smail’s Printing Works, Innerleithen.
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Historically the City Observatory complex was a place to house telescopes and observe the stars but city observatories are also places to view, to reflect upon a city, to bring people together, laboratories to research and follow academic pursuits.
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John James Audubon, Passenger Pigeons, c.1824.
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France-Lise McGurn 3am 11 July – 30 August Preview 10 July | 6—8pm France-Lise McGurn’s wide-ranging practice is derived from a non-indexical album of collected imagery and moving image files. This improvised archive includes recordings of castrato voices, book covers such as Hal Ellson’s Tomboy (1960), Vaslav Nijinsky’s own drawings and the sheet music for Old Souls (1974). Informed by this archive, all objects and surfaces have the potential to become expedient sites for the metabolic marking of thought processes. The collected source materials share themes such as identity construction, gender portrayal, juvenile delinquency, and the ephemera of social communion. France-Lise’s works, often depicting a cast of rebel characters, explore the potential connotations of gender and sexuality in the written word, letter or drawn line.
Scott Rogers Endling 12 September – 1 November Preview 11 September 6—8pm Scott Rogers’ practice navigates the tensions of stasis and decay through sculpture, video, writing, and performance. As part of Satellites Programme, Scott is undertaking a process of research, looking at the binds between extinction and cannibalism, building on previous bodies of work that examine how the physical breakdown of material is simulated and fetishised within human economies.
Editions & Publications
Collective
Beatrice Gibson, Crippled Symmetries, 2015, 16 mm and DV transferred to HD, sound (surround). Courtesy of the Laura Bartlett Gallery and LUX, London.
Satellites Programme is Collective’s development Programme for emergent artists and practitioners based in Scotland.
Observers’ Walks
Royal Terrace
Beatrice Gibson Crippled Symmetries 30 July – 4 October Preview 29 July | 5—7pm Crippled Symmetries is a new film by artist Beatrice Gibson that takes American author William Gaddis' epic modernist masterpiece, JR (1975) as its departure point. An eerily prescient, biting social satire that turns the American dream on its head, JR tells the story of a precocious 11 year-old capitalist who inadvertently creates the single greatest financial empire the decade has seen, spun largely from the invisible confines of the school pay phone. Using the novel as a score for its production, and orientated around an experimental music workshop for kids, the film also draws on the work of radical educators and composers Brian Dennis and John Paynter, who infamously took the work of Cornelius Cardew, John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen into primary and secondary schools and were at the forefront of radical post-war utopian shifts towards child-centred pedagogy.
Crippled Symmetries is co-commisioned by Collective, Grazer Kunstverein and FLAMIN (Film London Artists' Moving Image Network). The exhibition is part of Edinburgh Art Festival.
Towards a City Observatory
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City Dome is Collective's space for major exhibitions and commissions.
How to find us
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At the heart of his exhibition will be a commissioned text on the topic of the disease Kuru (known also as ‘Laughing Sickness’). This neurological disorder, similar to Mad Cow Disease, emerged among the South Fore people of Papua New Guinea and was caused predominantly by the consumption of human brain material.
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Collective is based at the City Observatory complex on Calton Hill. Situated in the heart of Edinburgh, it is a few minutes' walk from Waverley railway station. Calton Hill is accessible on foot from Waterloo Place, and Royal Terrace. If you require disabled access please contact the gallery on +44 (0)131 556 1264
Collective’s vision is to be a new kind of City Observatory for Edinburgh; encouraging engagement, connecting with the locality through the acts of looking, thinking and producing in relation to the historic culture of the site. A planning application has been submitted for the site, please visit our website to view the plans or find out more about this innovative project.
Tris Vonna-Michell The Artist and The Gravedigger: After D.O. Hill 17 mins Tris Vonna-Michell has made a work centred on the pioneering calotype photography of David Octavius Hill, who worked with Robert Adamson at Rock House, which is on the south west side of Calton Hill. Bedwyr Williams Outwith 20 mins Performed by Hilary Lyon This audio guide takes the listener through a series of stories created by the artist, which are all set in a local hotel, visible from Calton Hill. Ruth Ewan and Astrid Johnston Memorialmania 54 mins Narrated by Tam Dean Burn and Ruth Milne In Memorialmania, Ruth Ewan and Astrid Johnston concentrate on the monuments and geology of Edinburgh’s Calton Hill. Observers’ Walks is funded by Outset Scotland. The tracks are available to download from Collective’s website or mp3 players can be borrowed from our reception during opening hours.
Black-Neb £200 May the People £150 Salisbury Crags £150 Contact mail@collectivegallery.net for more information or to order a print. Ruth Ewan, Black-neb, limited edition print of 20, printed by Robert Smail's Printing Works, Innerleithen, 2013. Courtesy of the artist and Collective, Edinburgh in association with Outset Scotland.
Julie Crawshaw Somersault Somersault is an experiential evaluation of All Sided Games by Julie Crawshaw, commissioned by Collective. All Sided Games was a series of off-site commissions, placing artists in and around venues built or used for the Edinburgh 1970, 1986 and Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. It brought people together to make work of mutual interest. Somersault is a research document that supports the understanding of what taking part in All Sided Games meant to participants and how evaluations might better capture the complexity of the relational associations of an experience. Julie Crawshaw is a researcher who works between art, planning and anthropology. Somersault will be available to download or print on demand from Collective's website.