NOW is the sixth and final of a number of exhibitions at Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to highlight the richness and diversity of artistic practice in Scotland and from around the world.
The bulk of the exhibition space was for Katie Paterson and individual rooms for Darren Almond, Shona Macnaughton and Lucy Raven.
Katie Paterson’s exhibition honours the incomprehensible vastness and deep time that puts human history into perspective.
The meditative quality suits the white walls and tall ceilings of the Modern 1 gallery.
Katie Paterson generates a lot of ideas and many go beyond a scribbled post-it note saved perhaps for another day.
Eighteen of these Ideas have been cut in silver text and displayed along the corridor of the gallery.
“A wave machine hidden inside the sea”.
“A place that exists only in moonlight” is an idea and also a limited edition book of containing the ideas with a cover printed with cosmic dust, a mixture of moon-dust, dust from Mars, shooting stars, ancient meteorites and asteroids.
It is said we are all made of stardust but the Fife Artist collaborates with scientists and technicians on works to take this further reportedly sending meteorite material back out of the atmosphere and into orbit round earth.
Her work is very thoughtful and contrived. Light bulb to Simulate Moonlight 2008 was 289 light bulbs with halogen filament and frosted coloured shell, cabinet, logbook.
The artist worked with specialists to create a light bulb with identical wave lengths - known as spectral measurements to moon light. The bulbs would provide a lifetimes moonlight based on average human lifespan.
I was reminded of my fetish for Habitat designer lights made affordable during the New Year sales at that furniture shop back in the day before Ikea’s Scandinavian omnipresence.
In Earth-Moon-Earth a “self playing” piano was programmed with Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven after it had been transmitted to and from the lunar surface using Morse code that was altered according to gaps in the code caused by the cratered surface.
The Morse code itself was also beautifully printed with spaces for the parts that did not return from flying to the moon and back to be played by the glossy grand piano.
All the dead stars is a black sheet of anondized aluminimum documenting the locations of 27000 dead stars.
Time pieces comprises 9 clocks calibrated to show numbers of hours in day and night defined in relation to Earth and each other.
I tried to remember if had ever wanted to have clocks with PARIS NEW-YORK LONDON on my wall and would this create for me an image as a worldly jetsetter albeit somewhat Eurocentric and with an eye on stock markets. Paterson’s conceptual art deals with the core of us, the material we are made of and what matters to us ? Do I need a stainless steel industrial lever pull citrus squeezer ? What attracts me to these objects and want to possess them ? What makes a necklace of fossils shaped like small planets and strung together so utterly exquisite ? Can the concepts of evolutionary time and formation of planets be separated from the commodity fetishism that is precious stone jewellery ?
In “Totality” a giant disco ball with 2 light sources seems utterly graceful. I was so captivated I did not read the card and appreciate at the time the mirrors were 10,000 from hundreds of years of photography, and a veritable mirror of the sun’s sequence eclipsed by the moon. A shiny disco ball in a Georgian drawing room constantly turning calls, in my mind, for a soundtrack Groove Armada’s album Chicago and the sofa from its cover perhaps. I realised that due to Covid the restricted time slots for the gallery have given my mind permission to create a sense of urgency to get round and see everything in at odds with the themes presented. Katie Paterson creates a sensory spaces in which we may linger and wonder. The ritual of the gallery and a sense of minimal aesthetic playing alongside seemingly mundane objects can take us by surprise when we allow that moment to be, where no time and no thought exist and we are only human being not human wanting.
A scented candle that can burn for 12 hours travels through layers of earthy smells mapped to places in the universe leaving us all at the end of the day in an odourless black hole.
I saw a website representing another of Katie Paterson’s long standing post it notes, incubated and taken life of its own through a lot of planning and providing a space for ritual and ceremony. That is the Future Library project with artists and collaborators creating a 100 year art work and manuscript based in Oslo.