There’s a just a glimmer of light left in the evening sky on Calton Hill as the preview night for Katie Shannon’s installation opens its doors. Outside, a group of Asian tourists with iPhones are taking selfies, their flashes like wildfire lightning in the frigid night air. But there’s free beer indoors and a welcome fire burns at the entry as an eager crowd of well-wishers surges in to witness this show from the Collective Gallery’s Satellites development programme for emergent artists and producers based in Scotland.
Sadly, what awaits us inside is – at best – disappointing. According to the blurb: “In Last Song for a Waterbaby, Katie moves between sound, image, print, sculpture and video to explore the alliances and collective experiences that form on dancefloors; kinships that are disconnected from reproduction or normative family structures. Images of late-night rituals are sampled, remixed and layered onto stretched and hanging latex, which becomes a screen for a video collage documenting the semi-lucid bathing of two friends.” But what we are presented with could easily be mistaken for a display area in any up-market high street boutique.
Two racks of screen printed garments draped interestingly on butchers’ hooks greet us upon entry, and a projector illuminates a video onto them and the screen behind, but we can’t make it out because – on preview night, at least – it’s blocked by groups of people with drinks casting their shadows onto the latex display area instead. And there appears to be no soundtrack, though this is later discovered on a vinyl disc that’s plugged into headphones that the viewer has to turn on and off to hear. There are some pleasant soundscapes on here – once the viewer comes across them – but nothing particularly earth-shattering and performance poets like Corporation Pop were doing this kind of material several years previously.
There is no doubting that Katie Shannon is an artist of promise, but, sadly, this installation does little to showcase her talent and – for this reviewer at least – certainly does not justify a trek up Calton Hill on a cold March night.
Exhibition runs 23rd March – 5th May 2019