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UNREALISED DREAMS
3 DECEMBER 2004 – 12 FEBRUARY 2005
MACKINTOSH GALLERY, GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART
Unrealised Dreams is a new exhibition from artistic partnership John Beagles
and Graham Ramsay. Since 1996, Beagles and Ramsay have produced a wide
variety of work including sculpture, video, installation and performance.
Their work has been widely exhibited internationally and recent exhibitions
include PS1 MOMA, New York and a solo exhibition at Gasworks Gallery,
London.
This exhibition is an ambitious new development of their project shown
at the Scottish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2003. For the exhibition
at the Mackintosh gallery, the artists have produced a substantial number
of new drawings as well as a number of 3 dimensional scale models and
prototypes. The models are housed in a series of large packing crates
originally designed to protect Charles Rennie Mackintosh furniture belonging
to the Glasgow School of Art collection. Beagles and Ramsay have replaced
Mackintosh's priceless museum pieces with their own transitory and subtle
interventions. The exhibition continues on a website featuring animated
versions of many of the drawings.
The drawings, as yet ‘Unrealised Dreams’, constitute an ongoing
and expanding series of plans, proposals, diagrams and projections for
possible future artworks; from proposed public sculptures to elaborate
Regency style wigmaking and remote controlled animals. Always humorous
and often dark, the drawings return to recurrent themes in their work;
food, consumption, mortality and grotesque self representation.
These drawings also feed on the history and style of Renaissance drawing,
and in particular the anatomical studies, inventions and grotesques of
Leonardo da Vinci. The artists were able to study Leonardo’s technique
at close quarters in the 2002 exhibition of his drawings at the Queens
Gallery, Edinburgh. As far as possible they have used authentic materials
and techniques common to the Renaissance and have explored methods of
distressing paper and ink. For their falsely aged paper they have looked
to Tom Keating, Elmyr de Hory and other masters of the art of deception.
This exhibition is supported by the Scottish Arts Council
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