Gustav Metzer

 Glasgow International

Kate Davis and Henrik Olesen

Kate Davis' domestic scale works look at the relationship between subject and object. In recent works like 'Three Form Study' (2004) and 'Participator' (2004) and the 'Participant series' (2004), drawings and sculpture have been utilised to create a three dimensional world complemented and completed by the addition of the viewer. By involving sculptural elements Davis places the power balance between the viewer and her drawings in the hands of the viewer. In doing so, she offers an alternative pattern which is open to multiple readings.

Henrik Olesen's artworks question the sexually political effects of everyday conventions. Contemporary and historical materials serve as the starting point for this inquiry. These materials include visual and textual representations drawn from the fields of architecture, the history of industrialization, the imposition of legally sanctioned punishment, verdicts handed down by the courts of law, the geographic and demographic distribution of capital, the natural sciences, and the history of art. Olesen uses the techniques of approproation, manipulation or contextual shifting to explore the theme of stigmatisation, criminalisation, and repression of homosexuality.

Jane Topping, Rupert Norfolk, Alasdair Gray

 Jane Topping's paradoxical documents are Janus faced, both conforming to the syntactical codes of language's grammatical goddess, and subverting her rules through idiosyncratic juxtaposition. Topping proposes to reclaim both the primary materials (the signs and tools) and the pre-existing contexts (structures and cultural artefacts) of the representative canon as her own.

This attempt to reclaim language leads to the risk of its perpetual collapse within the work. Language is presented as a combination of evocative components muddled, not in a deferral of meaning but more as a form of nostalgic reconfiguration.

This potential or actual collapse of meaning is not intended as a Babylonian chastisement. Rather it testifies to the productive reconfiguration of the speech act in its every manifestation. The work is a stage upon which the letters and words stand as figures. The images become props and the whole page a window through which semantic moment is constructed and played out.

Rupert Norfolk's work might be superficially diverse, but his carefully selected elements are always patterned by the same flexible logic. Leaves (shown in "Tripping Over a Varicoloured Tangle of Wires", The Lowry, Salford. 2004) is less a simulation of natural forms than a reinvention of them, the nicks and folds of fallen leaves transformed into oddly geometric wooden shapes. Conversely, Animals records the real distortions inflicted on a number of stylised rubber toys, who seem to be trapped in a hellish artificial space just behind the surface of the paper.

In his drawings and sculptures there appears to be a kind of slippage between the information you are given and what actually seems to be happening. The tension that develops between what is implied and what exists as material, is somehow characterised by each work's own, purported nature.

Alasdair Gray, Less well known than his literary work, Gray's drawings and prints show varying connections to his novels, some function as direct illustrations while others hold a more autonomous status.

Having studied at The Glasgow School of ARt, Gray continued his practice as an artist doing numerous mural paintings and wrote the critically acclaimed novel Lanark published in 1981. 'A surreal mural of unsettling images and ideas vigorously coloured with anarchic humour, an epic fable that subverts submission to hypocritical social codes'. National Library of Scotland.

Craig Mulholland

 Take a little. Leave a little. But always take more than they leave by the basic nature of the vampire process of inconspicuous but inexorable consumption. The vampire converts quality-live blood, vitality, youth, talent-into quantity-food and time for himself.

He perpetrates the most basic betrayal of the spirit, reducing all human dreams to his shit.

William Burroughs, Immortality.

Craig Mulholland was born 1969. He lives and works in Glasgow. Recent exhibitions include Plastic Casino, Sorcha Dallas Gallery, Glasgow, (2004).

"Conceptually I am interested in how ideas relevant to current technology are actually relevant to life. Current computer technology seems in many ways to be like a surrealist analogy for the self or at least for a human. In a way I am interested in stripping things down in order to reveal their component parts. I like the idea that if something is as simple as it can be and still functions, then it is good and in its optimum condition.

 In art, the exchange of information is interesting because it happens instantly and at almost ambient level. But the whole signal is never really transmitted at once.

I find this fascinating and it is partly why I strive to disassemble structures and set them against themselves. The resulting paradoxes and loose ends seem to me to be almost infinitely revealing.'