A solo exhibition of drawings and mixed media sculptures.
3 December 2004 – 12 February 2005.
PRESS RELEASE
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.
