The WIP #7: Love on the Rails
The Week in Photos (10-16 February 2024)
Of all the artist-run galleries in Glasgow, there is none more charming than Queens Park Railway Club, which is tucked away in a small wood-panelled room on the island platform of Queens Park station. The best way to visit it is to go to Glasgow Central and take the six-minute trip that leaves you at the door. All for just £2.30 return.
The gallerists, Patrick Jameson and Ellis Luxemburg are currently hosting a group show called ‘Love on the Dole’, which opened on Valentine’s Day. They invited an array of artists to contribute a work about love. I particularly liked Ross Sinclair’s paintings, Walker and Bromwich’s Love Cannon, Pandora Vaughan’s banner, and Francis Thorburn and Claudia Langley-Mills’s performance snogging. Don’t miss it this weekend.
Romance and the railways have long been connected. Who can forget the passion of Brief Encounter or the innuendo at the end of North by Northwest? The station is a place of chance meetings, sad goodbyes, and welcome returns. The train is a metaphor for the sense of our moving without being fully in control.
On Thursday night, we saw the launch of Into the New, the degree showcase by RCS’s Contemporary Performance Practice students. All the excerpts were entertaining, but I was particularly struck by Dale Jordan Thrupp’s lucid lecture on systems of domination and control. Over the last 500 years, humanity has become alienated from nature, parcelling out the planet, and unleashing demonic forces in the form of nuclear bombs and climate change. It’s difficult to go from such an exercise of power to the humility of being one part of an ecosystem.
Lilli Kuschel’s film Neighbors, which I saw last week, is one such attempt at multi-species storytelling which follows crows around Berlin. It was difficult not to anthropomorphise, despite her best efforts to decentre the human. We are not that different, being bound to instincts for the four Fs: fighting, fleeing, feeding and mating.
On Saturday, some friends were in Glasgow for a wedding and needed to borrow our parking space. I believe this was the happy couple heading back from their photoshoot.
While they were at the wedding, I headed to StreetLevel Photoworks to see photojournalist Jenny Matthews’ extraordinary embroidered images of women affected by war.
It was my friends’ first outing with the baby. When they returned I had another chance to hang out with my newest pal, Sandy, a two-month-old who has taken to staring intensely at random spots on the wall as if he can see a ghost. Here he is in a moment of movement.