Arts review: Dundee degree show 2010

Published on Monday 31 May 2010 21:28

DEGREE SHOW 2010 **** DUNCAN OF JORDANSTONE COLLEGE OF ART AND DESIGN, DUNDEE

'WATCH you don't walk into a wall," a young man tells me, indicating that I should pick up a light – a coloured torch inside a jam jar – before venturing through the door into the bowels of the Matthew Building. Inside, it's pitch dark. I'm in a maze, or possibly a grid from a Pacman computer game, judging by the retro-electro soundtrack.

This is the world of Edward Shallow, musician, visionary, video-game character and alter-ego of Kyle McKelvie, a student on DJCAD's Time-based Art and Digital Film course. Navigating with my hand-held light, I find a film, a performance space and an image that can be altered using a joystick. There's something about the whole adventure which is a fitting metaphor for the start of degree show season.

At this time of year, we find ourselves exploring art school buildings, from the basements to the attics, not knowing what we will find. DJCAD, always the earliest, has returned, after last year's excursion to the vision building, to the labyrinth of the college itself where the visitor might be well advised to scatter breadcrumbs as he voyages from Fine Art to Jewellery, Illustration to Interactive Media Design.

Here is a strong pack of young artists, not afraid to be large in their vision, to explore other worlds, utopian or dystopian, and to look back at our own world from the vantage point of another. And nowhere was this more clear than in Time-based Art, where a strand of ambitious narrative film is led by Matt Cameron, who seems to have enlisted most of his classmates as the crew of his short film, Meta. The result is a gritty sci-fi drama of parallel worlds and life-sapping addictions which would stand comfortably alongside professional low-budget films.

The dystopian vision continues with various classmates: Paul Christie envisages contemporary Britain as a police state press-ganging the young into an unnamed war; Christopher McGill creates a paranoic world infiltrated by an alien presence through implants, and Dale Hendry reimagines Dundee as a ghost town infected with predatory zombies.

Across in Fine Art, Alyson Kaliska (alias Gillian Clarke) turns our fascination with other worlds on its head with a playful spaceship installation. Nodding, perhaps, to the homespun sets of early sci-fi movies, everything is cardboard, from the control panel to the captain's iPod, to the Star Trek-style teleport unit. David Wylie's vision is more macabre with his disturbing sculptural hybrids of man and machine.

The shiny boulder-like sculptures of James Lee (one of several students here on the theory-based Art, Philosophy and Performance Practice course) have a space-age feel to them, but his subject is political and artistic resistance. His raw material is pulped print – from packaging to pound notes to mortgage application forms – wiped clean of its ideologies and made into something new. One grows plants, another contains a video monitor.

Other artists look intently at the shapes and textures of our own world. Stephanie Northcote investigates organic and man-made forms through a range of craft media, from crochet to sculpting in wax. Rhiannon Van Muysen works on both micro and macro scale, studying substances in petri dishes, though her large, highly-worked abstract paintings look more like planets and stars. Helen Budge's intricate paintings could be micro or macro, galaxies or coral reefs or DNA strands. Whichever, they are assured and beautiful.

Some look to the beyond, and to the past, like Karen Spy whose performances explore the role of the shaman and of ritual in the modern world, perhaps with a nod to Joseph Beuys. Meanwhile Chloe Windsor's installation of pyramids and standing stones looks not only at the power with which such objects were imbued in the past but how much they still have today.

DJCAD has always nurtured a strong figurative tradition and this year is no exception. Naomi Archibald's portraits of children dressing up capture something of the strangeness of the young mind – a mixture of childlike vulnerability and expressions which seem to prefigure the adult who will emerge.

Katie Johnston's ethereal nudes seem to emerge, ghost-like, from their oatmeal canvases, while Catriona King's lively portraits of a book group, each paired with an extract from a favourite text, are confident and painterly. Ross Main experiments with washes of orange and yellow to capture the flood-saturated landscapes of Indonesia, across which figures pick their way, hoisting their belongings above chest-deep water.

The interest in the human figure extends into sculpture, to Nuala Early's evocative wire forms, and to the film-makers: Cara Pirie's gently sympathetic documentary about Dundee's model boat builders; Susie Mackie's compelling film Florance, which holds its audience with the narrative drive of a short story.

Back in Fine Art, Kimberley Stewart recreates old photographs out of house dust. It's one of those master-stroke ideas where medium and subject matter marry perfectly; faded faces from the past – a child on the back of a miniature pony, a faded wedding party – are reproduced in dust, itself the stuff of past lives.

Adding a further dimension to the figurative are the bodies of work which have clearly been shaped by personal experience. Hazel Swan's installations on the theme of childlessness are both subtle and powerful. A child's cot re-imagined as a compost bed is redolent with images of life, death, growth and recovery.

Alison Tarry's moving reflection on the nature of memory was inspired by her grandmother's descent into Alzheimer's disease. Her portrait – smiling but indistinct, or talking on a silent film – seems to withdraw from us even as the world withdraws from her.

Gillian Smith's investigation of the nature of pain is rigorous and brave. Having told us that pain is impossible to communicate, she then makes an admirable attempt with a two part installation: one part is full of throbs and screeches and pulses of jarring colour, the other contains a simple telephone and chair.

Another welcome trait at DJCAD is a willingness to engage in traditional painting, and even in its subject matter. This is a great way for artists to learn, but sometimes seems to be regarded almost with shame, as if it fails to satisfy the criteria of originality. Art schools might do well to remember that car manufacturers don't constantly reinvent the wheel.

Rachael Rebus creates interior paintings capturing the light and space of gothic architecture with vivid brush strokes. Megan Holmes clearly has an eye on the Impressionists, creating landscapes which are really about the play of light. Louise Stark's dreamy east-coast horizons seem to owe something to Whistler.

And always there are people who strike out on their own: Joss Allen, who has found a way (though don't ask me to explain the physics of it) of drawing with sound. Daisy Cooper makes decorative designs on the insides of animal skins. Lucy Oldale has turned one of the art school's sheds into a laboratory where she makes fascinating studies relating to insects and light.

And then there's Mary Somerville's claymation, Jan Williamson's beautiful botanical drawings, ambitious large-scale sculpture from Scott Watson, who manages to tie a lamp-post in knots. And there are more, too many to mention, as there always are. But the strongest of this year's crop at DJCAD are as eclectic and mature a group of artists as I would hope to see at any of this year's degree shows.

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