Electric Eye

Electric Eye was a solo exhibition that took place in the Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow. Continuing several lines of enquiry pursued in other exhibitions it proposed an apophenic approach to art history. Apophenia, a pathological desire to perceive connections in seemingly unrelated phenomena, is a characteristic normally associated with conspiracy theorists. This mindset was employed here to propose a series of connections between abstract art, experimental psychiatry and the industrial military complex. The exhibition featured an installation of colour field paintings that were accompanied by a series of sculptures that repurposed vintage lobby ashtrays as listening devices. Configured to be capable of recording nearby conversations, these sculptures presented the gallery as a space of potential surveillance, as opposed to a privileged site of aesthetic contemplation. This gesture resonates in part with practices adopted during the Cold War, but also with the ways in which various forms of data are gathered and utilised today. In the sculpture courtyard of the Hunterian I installed an outdoors work modelled on the ‘chembuster,’ an esoteric device supposedly able to disperse atmospheric formations overhead through the use of orgone. This referenced the close ties several Modernist artists and critics of the 1960s had to Reichian methods of psychoanalysis, while resembling the painted sculpture of the artist Jules Olistki. This exhibition was accompanied by an artist’s talk and a screening event at Glasgow University entitled 'Artist as Subject.' The screening programme featured the films 'Who is Richard Smith?' by Denis Postle (1968), and 'To the German Language' by RH Quaytman with Jeff Preiss (2012). Both films make use of a disparate range of source material, and use various forms of montage as a means of presenting this