30th April 2018: James Clegg Talks Art; Lunch at Talbot Rice Gallery
Come along to the Talbot Rice Gallery (The University of Edinburgh, South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL) on 30th April 2018 from 12 to 3pm for a leisurely lunch kindly provided by the Talbot Rice Gallery. The event is open to all and a chance to hear the thoughts of James in relation to the art which he helps curate…
Set among the exhibitions of Rachel Maclean and David Claerbout at Talbot Rice Gallery, this informal, free lunch event will give you the opportunity to engage with the provocative work of two leading contemporary artists.
Touching upon ideas about how digital technology is changing our world and the perils of capitalism, assistant curator James Clegg will lead a discussion based around the video artworks on display.
Welcoming anyone with an interest in art, this free event is part of the Ragged University programme and is hosted by Crisis in Scotland and Talbot Rice Gallery.
James Clegg is Assistant Curator for Talbot Rice Gallery, who among other duties helps to plan exhibitions and events and leads on knowledge exchange activities. This is one of many events James has created in collaboration with The Ragged University. He wants to make sure as many people as possible feel welcome and comfortable coming to the Gallery to engage with contemporary art and subject matters.
Talbot Rice Gallery is one of Scotland’s leading contemporary art galleries. Part of the University of Edinburgh, it was founded in 1975 and has earned a reputation for pioneering links between artistic practice, research and education. Engagement with societal issues is a hallmark of the Gallery’s work, underpinned by a curatorial commitment to risk-taking and experimentation. An active part of Edinburgh College of Art and the University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Gallery is ideally placed at the heart of discussions about the social role and function of art in Scottish culture.
More About The Artists
Rachel Maclean
Born in Edinburgh, Rachel Maclean uses multimedia to explore politics and society through themes of identity. Creating bright and vivid landscapes filled with strange characters that tweak our imaginations in uneasy ways, the fantasy worlds are used to bring you into fantasy worlds that mimic and reflect our real experience.
Using digital technologies to generate whole universes in which to set her fairytale-eque settings, she carefully constructs every element of the encounters from the vivid and colour replete costumes to the make up which suggests a collision between the Commedia dell’arte of early professional theatre in Italy from the 16th century with hints of the post anime reality of neuromancer. Bringing together found audio from television and film to create the storied worlds, she infuses this all with a mixture of themes which concern and amuse.
Over The Rainbow made in 2013 transports the audience into an emorphious and changing world filled with anathema like monsters, duplicate wrathes and frightening pop divas. Constructed through green screen filming techniques, what you see is all computer generated as Rachel plays out the parts herself exploring Grimm parodies of the modern fairytale, gamer worlds and horror films.
David Claerbout
Born in Belgium, David Claerbout’s work merges aspects of still photography with elements of moving image. Breaking traditional bounds his work repositions the viewer in a frame of a living landscape that disturb the fictions that inform our perception. Playing with themes of continuity and time, the audience is pushed to encounter reality in ways unfamiliar but obvious to our experience.
His career has developed through painting, photography and graphic mediums investigating how we encounter the animus of the work in our living minds. How our world is depicted through such mediums such as film shapes the way we work in the world, and Claerbout takes special effort to interrogate how film operates in our culture challenging the representations we carry around of connection, linearity and context.