PRESS RELEASE:
Two-Step by Beth Shapeero and Fraser Taylor, 2019
Private View: Friday 12th July: 6 – 9pm
Opening Times: 13th, 18th, 19th, 20th July: 12 – 4pm or by appointment
249 Govan Road
G51 1HJ
Govan Project Space are delighted to present the inaugural collaborative exhibition 'Two-Step' by Beth Shapeero and Fraser Taylor. The installation consists of a 32ft x 16ft grid of recent mono-screen-prints composed on a purpose built leaning wall. The structure and grid echo their process and approach which is dynamic, bold, and dependent on the unanticipated. It challenges the scale of the gallery and building as well as the positioning of painting and printmaking as domestically scaled. The collaboratively produced prints are collectively visually impactful and an assault on the senses.
Beth Shapeero and Fraser Taylor began their collaboration after meeting and discovering one another's practice while on residence at the Studio Pavilion at House for an Art Lover in 2017. Noticing their distinct shared aesthetic; a remarkably familiar use of abstract form and line in particular, they have developed an improvised fast-paced screen printing practice at Glasgow Print Studio. Their separate outputs are (almost unnervingly) similar and their shared interest in the discourse between the visual arts and design questions how different these disciplines are – and why?
Together they make an unlikely pair; Beth is an emerging artist from Nottingham who has lived in and been working in Glasgow since 2011. Fraser, originally from Glasgow is established and has spent a significant part of his career working in Chicago where he was a faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are an energetic team with a rigorous and divers work ethic. Beth graduated her BA in Fine Art (Hons) at Nottingham Trent University in 2008 before relocating to Glasgow for the M.Litt in Fine Art Practice in 2011. Fraser graduated from GSA in 1981 with a BA in Printed Textiles and an MA in 1983 from the RCA in London. He returned to live and work in Glasgow in 2017.
‘The result is work(s) whose final condition is somewhat accidental, yet also precisely determined by the velocity of the artist’s relationship with both each other and the printing press. And here we see the collaboration harnessing a tension between limitation and liberation. Once freed from any apparent notions of planning formal representation, content or theme, the works are able to truly investigate (themselves), experiment and even fail.’
Simon Buckley
‘I see a directness ‘dance’ across every surface. I do not only see the drawings, I experience them bodily too, at times fluid and running in a kind of loop, where the first and last actions feed one another in spatially fragmented choreographies.’
Lauren Printy Currie
Contact – govanprojectspace@gmail.com