Ben Woodeson - Reviews

The Guardian

Absolut Open, Inverleith House, Edinburgh, 1999.

By Elisabeth Mahoney, The Guardian 29/11/1999.

The initial impression from this open exhibition of up-to-the-minute Scottish art is that the lunatics have taken over the asylum. - the asylum in this case being the Georgian splendour of Inverleith House. In its high-ceilinged rooms sit Andrew Kerr's cardboard boat, with all the fixing glue on the out-side like some mean bit of quilting, Scott Myles's upside-down video of a man revolving, and an ant-conservatory or bricked up extension called Folly by Dagg/Hunter.

There are all the cross-currents and contradictions you expect in an open: no one style or medium dominates. There is little consideration of Scottishness; instead, the links between exhibits are to do with deep, dark humour and the mystery of objects. Louise Hopkins produces every Euro-sceptics nightmare - a laboriously repainted map of Europe without the seas; Ben Woodeson (known for his expansive installations) makes a series of increasingly pre-posterous proposals for the exhibition space.

Glasgow-based Ross Birrell, who won the show's prize - a £4,000 commission - has a nice line in gags, too. He wears his knowledge of art history, avant-gardism and cultural theory lightly, producing works that make you smile knowingly, even when you don't know what he's on about. An apple-green mincer mangles the pages of books on a shelf; diagrams from popular psych- ology books are transformed into elliptical wall-drawings. Best of all, he creates a haiku-like couple of lines ("Imagine Yoko Ono Does Not Exist") to come up with a painting (After Yoko Ono). Wit, mind-bending drawings and fifties kitchen implement: absolutely spot-on.