Shifting Ground/Robin Fox RGB
Shifting Ground/Robin Fox RGB
Tramway, Glasgow
Mary Brennan
IT IS not just bodies that are moving in dynamic ways in this HOT season of new dance and performance from Australia. Media artist and performer Zoe Scoglio has ways of making solid stone come alive while Robin Fox's Laser Show turns light into sound, sets colours dancing while their interaction throws animated patternings on a far wall.
Scoglio's Shifting Ground starts with an affable welcome: a little glass of honey and ginger tea, wee edible rock cakes and invitation to pick up a stone - Tramway 4 has become a mini-grotto full of caringly-constructed outcrops, or maybe shrines to the geology that Scoglio celebrates in this piece. At the far end of the space is what she calls "the living room".
With coffee-table, sofa, pot plant, it all looks very domestic, but the "living" part is what happens when light, sound and projections come into play. Our own bones feel the thrumming vibrations that send particles shimmying across the table-top, but the most plangent reminder that our flesh and blood is grounded in mineral compounds is when the surface of a large stone suddenly melts (under screened images) into a craggy face that sings.
If Scoglio's work sucks you into meditative contemplation, Robin Fox's laser show - seen minutes later - is like a physical onslaught, shimmering between dazzling and brutal. Red, green and blue lasers slice through the darkness of Tramway 1, their pulsings translated into percussive punches that whammy the eardrums.
As the beams hit a wall, they morph into painterly fingertips that doodle spirals and zigzags or spatter splodges like an invisible Jackson Pollock wielding a light sabre. Afterwards, the sunlight seems reassuringly staid.
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