Strands
Geoff Uglow, Nicola Boag, Sean Kerr, Ian Sandilands, Ilona Ikonen, Gareth Williams, Michael Visocchi, Matthew Brown
5 February - 12 February 2000

The thirdyear of collaboration between artists from Glasgow School of Art and composers from the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. All of the composers work in the electroacoustic medium using recorded sound as their starting point, and it is the nature of this work, interrogating the boundaries between music and sound-art which was an important catalyst for the project.
The artists come from different disciplines within art (video, sculpture, painting) and - and the exhibition, therefore, explores a variety of relationships between sound, music, visual work and time-based structures.

Geoff Uglow & Nicola Boag - 'Ondine's Triptych'. This work was concerned with the pace and fluidity of movement. The music and the paintings are conceived in many layers which create complex and shifting structures.

Sean Kerr & Ian Sandilands - 'Neo Paths- Fleeting is the Foot in This Fair Land'. "We took traditional Scottish music and landscape as the starting point for our collaboration. The piece 'Tonguer Dale Reel' activated a journey back and forth across a matrix of synthesised and constructed shapes. Thus progressive and spatial movements become a fleeting journey marked out by collisions and slippage of recognisable forms into low and high frequency bursts. The installation has used the idea of a grid (tartan laid flat) to map out and play with musical and spatial composition. Yet the silent awkward steps of muffles shoes present the idea of a lost horizon or at least an unobtainable landscape, referring to a landscape that is as much fictional as it is fragile."

Ilona Ikonen & Gareth Williams - 'A Story in Fragments'. Reality becomes animated by your own state of mind both in sound and vision.

Michael Visocchi & Matthew Brown - 'Musical Block'. The starting point for this collaborative piece arose from a meeting between composer Matthew Brown and sculptor Michael Visocchi. The outcome of this meeting was the decision to base the project on an existing piece of music composed for a string quartet , first performed by R.S.A.M.D. students a year ago. One section of the music is comprised of an incessant step-like rhythm, which became the basis for the visual development. The graduation of the seven pairs of prisms, or 'boxes', correspond to the seven central notes in the music. The pitching of the 'boxes' with fishing line suggests the movement of processional dancers and links the visual and musical representation of strings. There is a strong emphasis on spatial interplay within the gallery space: the raised platform is integral to the presentation of the work.