Venue: 46 King Street Description of artwork: Considering the rhetoric edge to the ideological context provided by the Home Office's safety pamphlet 'Preparing for Emergencies', Niall Macdonald offered a rereading of an earlier Government's attempt to reassure the public through political placebo. Looking through sensible instructions and carefully worded descriptions guiding home owners through the building of domestic bomb shelters, he has teased out and pieced together a subtext of physicality which is direct and symptomatic. The governing text has become an abstracted and condensed list, a litany of paraleipsis; of hidden, avoided or threatened experience. "blast, burn, heat, light, exposure, absorption, ionisation, pollution, distortion, combustion, rarefaction, severance, shattering, gouging, blinding, earthquakes, collapsing, bending, compressing, deformation, rupture, failure, rapid decay, drag force, diffraction, reflection, haemorrhage" (sample) The full piece was printed as a prose-poem onto A0 manuscript and presented on the window of the Merchant City space. This new transcript was fragmented, partial and extreme. It must be actively re-contextualised, calling into question the role of language in the rhetoric that repeatedly blinds and binds?. Statement about current work: niall MACDONALD's current practice aims to address hierarchical forms of discourse and description, primarily concerning the individual in relation to the larger structures of influence and action. He uses fine art as a language to posit perhaps unanswerable questions, creating pieces of work that are at once gestural and critical. Biography of artist: niall MACDONALD is a practicing artist based in Glasgow, who has exhibited both nationally and internationally with upcoming exhibitions in Glasgow, the Netherlands, and the USA. His practice covers gallery work, publications, and site-based projects, with a focus on sculpture, text, and intervention. In addition to his individual practice, Macdonald also exhibits as a member of the artists group Something Haptic, who in 2002 also initiated Trajectory, a publication house for artists books. |