(Heart) Ripped Out
A FAR TOO SENTIMENTAL WALK THROUGH GLASGOW
[1] I’ve been thinking about getting my Keith Haring tattoo, my Uniqlo T-Shirt upper arm tattoo, lasered off. It’s one of his dogs. Ripped up out of my skin about ten years after I put it in there past my eighteenth birthday. I’m thinking about ripping things out. I’m seeing ripped out posters, excavated from New York City subway system walls, in ripped-up rooms in galleries. I’m seeing frames inside frames at the 2024 edition of Glasgow International, and in the homes and spaces of unaffiliated artists.
[2] Ripped out or ripped up? Up is the carpet, the floorboards, the bolted-down furniture; out is pictures, references; is Lord of the Rings cardboard cutouts, is the teeth, eyes and gauntlets in Saint Michael Triumphs over the Devil; up is construction, built up, is blue painters tape on a perimeter ordering a steadied maintenance of constructed form, which is all to say—in a convoluted way—collaged. Torn edges of paper-pencil-thin lines blend into words into tape into smoke.
[3] Paper leather is embossed with keys, seams ripped and the pattern pieces flattened against a wall. Keyed-out mortices ghost blue jeans stencilled in hot pink; airbrushed. Kiln-fired glass moths hold colours in stasis. Everything’s caught and pinned up, stretched taught, in metal nets; intimate gatherings are cross-hatched, cross-stitched; into a raucous love-stain. [4] And I didn’t want to write artificial intelligence or image-generated; these pictures are traced from somewhere known. Wet and glistening within from erasures, from redactions of gloss. Exposed from partial memory, faces bridge bridges of noses to full lips, each feature its own image. There’s ripped up pigment over scraped-clean wood grain. I’m struck by their beauty against aeolian melodies, hung above lead provocations. The line comes up like it were a tacked down wire.
[5] The two of them pull it up and put it back—returning what’s already out. The Three Crowns is ripped out red, it’s a burnt down gay bar. Each piece of it laid back on top of itself. One on the other on the next, these warm-captured memories are all ash-dusted. What’s taken it out. I can’t remember when I heard those words between shocks of punctuating sound. Jump scare. What’s taken it out. Bobbi’s film withdrew something from me with each motioning repetition. [6] And harbouring actions; exercises over video calls, recollections of a mother; sunken waves of conversation, docu-styled, in ruins dug up on hand-processed [sic] (piss-processed) film.
Forgive my sentimentality, I can’t help it, I’m on one. I can’t help but think of my own family—who I’ve written about before, I’ve preserved in some way, with dementia. Have I torn her into place? [7] Sandra George’s photographs are overwhelming, their archive is a mirror not a portal nor a punch out. Boycott posters are pinned up in a picture in a frame. There doesn’t seem like much difference between now and then, forty years ago, though we now no longer boycott in protest of South African apartheid.
[8] The frames in frames are on paper on canvas. Inside a lived history in the living room is in the restaging of Interstice (2008) by Hayley Tompkins (on a stack of books on a chair) on a laptop in her old room. In front of a view from her video, amongst views of paper drawings and paper paintings on prior walls, these works are all excavating together. There’s paper on paper on a canvas in a frame. There's ‘Bad Taste’ written on Bad Taste (2024), Julia Gilmour, in crushed-up silver specs.
[9] Rose petal perfume pulling up that tacked-down line—the British Indo-European Telegraph Line that once spanned Iran for over fifty years. In the Mitchell Library, tracing, finger on page, over a colonial line. A personal archive taken up alongside etching points whose impression remains printed onto a beautiful familial voyage.
I am fortunate to feel connected to these works and while this short review doesn’t afford them much room, I wanted to lay out some sense of serendipitous link (a woven chainmail) between them. One fibre-thread pulled up from their fabrics.
It’s not everything that’s on but it’s everything I liked.
—Andy x
In order of appearance: [1] Subway Drawings, Keith Haring, The Modern Institute, Glasgow. [2] Legendary Psychasthenia, Sam Keogh, Josie Perry, Tai Shani, 32 Washington Street, Glasgow. [3] Where a castle meets the sky, Emelia Kerr Beale, Suds McKenna, Josie Perry, Jonny Walker, The Pipe Factory, Glasgow. [4] DEFIXIONES, Jamie Crewe, Radclyffe Hall, Glasgow. [5] I’M ATTENDED AS A PORTAL MYSELF, Bobbi Cameron and Owain Train McGilvary, 5 Florence Street, Glasgow. [7] Sandra George, Sandra George, 5 Florence Street, Glasgow. [8] NOT 2NIGHT, Julia Gilmour, Patrick McAlindon, Hayley Tompkins, 45 Alexandra Park Street, Glasgow. [9] Farang/فرنگ, Mina Heydari-Waite, Offline, Glasgow.
Links to exhibition details are included in the main body of the text.