SCENE 1 - Scene Without Scene:

Elaine Allison | Tim Chamberlain | Fanny Lam Christie | Su Grierson | Roddy Mathieson | Douglas McBride | Charmian Pollok | Duncan Robertson | Siobhan Tarr

Exhibition Dates: 9 May - 26 July 2009
Open Mon to Sat 10am - 5pm
or late on performance evenings
Threshold artspace, Redrooms, Perth Theatre, 185 High Street, Perth PH1 5UW

A copy of the Exhibition Guide can be downloaded from www.horsecross.co.uk

Perthshire Visual Arts Forum (PVAF) and Horsecross present a contemporary visual art exhibition at the Threshold artspace at Perth Theatre for this year's Perth Festival of the Arts 2009. This is the first part of a series of two exhibitions to showcase works by PVAF members.

Guest curator Liz Adamson of Polarcap has selected the works, and commented:
"The exhibition creates a strong reference to landscape, our complex relationship with the natural world, memory, history and time"

Tim Chamberlain's works depicting the roamer, the loner, the owner discuss and interrogate our ingrained constructs of wilderness. One man's sanctuary is another man's factory. High on a cliff top, Duncan Robertson's pilgrim/seeker confronts nature in all its grandeur whilst waving an enormous flag. Charmain Pollock's Ghost Croft: the abandoned shoe, the drawers that once held clean linen now form sculptural disarray. Elaine Allison's constructions feature dangling keys, faded photographs, curious scientific contraptions reminiscent of bygone days of the Victorian explorer and collector, delicate birds eggs, secrets and mysteries. Sobhan Tarr re-constructs untypical images with a contemporary content, using modern and vintage porcelain fragments and glass.

Douglas McBride's images of West Perthshire are quiet and relective, relating to his experience of this particular landscape. Roddy Mathieson's intricate silkscreen prints are based on drawings of the river systems of the Clyde, the Tay, the Dee and the Don in dendrite tree form. Su Grierson's ongoing project 'Marking Time' discuses documentation, collection, journeys, time ritual and tradition, as she observes and records people's habits of "marking trees". Fanny Lam Christie's 'Earth' depicts both beauty and turmoil, and questions our everchanging relationship with the environment and our ability to control the forces of nature.

The exhibition is complemented by ONSCREEN, a showcase on a flat screen of digital images of a further 53 PVAF members' work.

Su Grierson, chair of PVAF, which has over 200 members in Perthshire and beyond, said:

"PVAF was set up by local professional artists and has put Perth at the centre of artistic activity both nationally and internationally. Linking artists geographically means the range of artistic practice is very wide from traditional to digital and new media."

"Artists offer the option of seeing the world differently. Come along and be entranced, surprised and intrigued and leave looking at life and thinking about this world a little bit differently."

This exhibition is jointly presented by PVAF and Horsecross, Threshold artspace in partnership with Liz Adamson of Polarcap.