Club: Rhythm Machine
Rhythm Machine is a night of dance music and live art where the lines between two merge/blur into each other for a party loaded with joy. Francis Dosoo, one of the organisers, describes the night as “an attempt to create an environment in which both communal and personal exploration and expression are openly encouraged and supported.”
They’ve been collaborating with artists in Edinburgh for a few years, using the platform as a testbed for performances, installations and whatever else. He continues “We want our audience members to feel as confident engaging in contemporary art as they do on the dancefloor and vice versa. Musically, the night was founded around the global new wave of the 1980’s and its many offshoots leading up to the present day.” He’s joined in the booth by Sofay, our most requested resident at The Art School and the person behind the amazing Self Service show on Subcity, plus visual work from these three artists.
Buzzcut 2017
Craig Manson
BEAR is a performance of loving gestures by a man in a bear mask. Crawling through a floor of foliage, the bear offers gifts of flowers, cuddles and tinned salmon to everyone in the room. Birds chirp, branches creak in the breeze, a piano gently plays through the speakers.
The work was the result of Craig’s given identity in the LGBT community as a Bear - a large, hairy gay man who is expected to project an image of rugged masculinity. Through deliberately ‘feminine’ acts and imagery, Craig attempts to re-imagine this identity by creating a space that feels tender and offers a meditation on the pressures of contemporary masculinity, and the pursuit of connection within an increasingly commodified LGBT culture.
Rachel Francis
“Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn’t give you what you desire – it tells you how to desire.”
Slavoj Žižek
In Smoke, visual artist Rachel Frances Sharpe explores the power of subliminal product placement on screen and its power to enforce desirability of commodity to you as the market audience. Through a smoke mirror scene of filmic installation you will consume intellectually, you may consume sexually, but ultimately you will be consumed in the desire of character and film…
F-M-I-N
F-M-I-N is a performance partnership between Amy Cameron & Leonie Rae Gasson.
“Our practice reflects our queer feminist outlook, our relationship as a couple and is focused thematically around sex. We make work across different art forms including film, durational performance and one-on-one work. We make work that makes queer women more visible. We make work so we can talk about things we’re not supposed to. We make work to make people feel togetherness. “.
