Thrills

Sophie Hall
Gabriel Levine Brislin
Iris Ollier
Ann Pearce

27/07/2024 - 04/08/2024

Embassy Gallery, 10b Broughton Street Lane, Edinburgh, EH1 3LY.

Shifting perspectives are at the heart of Thrills – a group show from four Edinburgh-based artists – with pieces transforming at the tilt of your head. Materials and images have been borrowed from institutions, social media and magazines, switching their contexts and throwing their contents into new light. Approaching ideas of ownership, appropriation, and objecthood with humour and playfulness, the works in the show explore themes of embodied perception, material language and questions pertaining to space and identity. These are the threads that are woven between the works, with each of the four artists approaching these questions in a range of mediums.

The works interact and play off of each other through rays of light and reflection, like Sophie Hall’s key box beaming down from above a doorway in the main exhibition space. Hall’s sculptures are consistently surprising, their precarious compositions concerned with the instability of certain everyday objects and insignia, playing tricks with the mind and how we see. Iris Ollier’s works – part-drawing, part-sculpture – speak through a symbolic language of freedom and attention, pulling imagery from classical painting and digital platforms. They hazily reflect the space around them in their scored steel surfaces, and the novelty of catching a glimpse of yourself in them is not unintentional. Along the back wall of the space, Gabriel Levine Brislin’s Cultural Capital repurposes books loaned from local libraries to investigate the transfer and control of images. Collating reproductions of Vermeer’s Lady Standing at a Virginal, which is currently on loan in Edinburgh from the National Gallery in London, Cultural Capital tacitly traces paths of power in art. These notions of ownership, authority and appropriation are also present in the glossy triptych assembled by Ann Pearce. Quietly referring to the visual language of late 20th century minimalist painting, Season investigates the formation of self and sociality through the editorial voice. The works on display in Thrills aim to unsettle the status of objecthood and property and to question received perceptions.

Text by Maxime Swift.

Photography by Andrew Perry.

Installation view.

‘Untitled’ (2024), Sophie Hall, balsa, colour digital prints on paper, mount board.

‘Untitled’ (2024), Sophie Hall, plaster.

Installation view of ‘Untitled’ (2024), Sophie Hall.

‘Untitled’ (2024), Sophie Hall, found metal, found screws, sharpie on mount board.

Installation view of ‘Untitled’ (2024), Sophie Hall & ‘Ball’ (2023), Iris Ollier

‘Untitled’ (2024), Sophie Hall, found key safe, LEDs.

‘Ball’ (2023), Iris Ollier, A-PET, acrylic MDF.

Installation view.

‘Untitled’ (2024), Iris Ollier, stainless steel, pine.

‘Girls On Their Phones’ (2024), Iris Ollier, stainless steel, pine.

‘Birds Vertical’ (2024), Iris Ollier, stainless steel, pine.

‘Still Life with Bugs’ (2024), Iris Ollier, stainless steel, pine.

‘Untitled’ (2024), Iris Ollier, stainless steel, pine.

‘FYP (1)’ (2024), Iris Ollier, stainless steel, pine.

‘FYP (2)’ (2024), Iris Ollier, stainless steel, pine.

‘Untitled’ (2024), Iris Ollier, stainless steel, pine.

Installation view of ‘Cultural Capital’ (2024), Gabriel Levine Brislin.

‘Cultural Capital’ (2024), Gabriel Levine Brislin, library books, wooden brackets.

‘Season’ (2023), Ann Pearce, magazine pages.

Installation view.

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