Monday, April 11, 2005

For me, the highlight of Simon Patterson's exhibition'High Noon' at the Fruitmarket Gallery was General Assembly, which filled the mezzanine floor of the Gallery and was particluarly poignant given the ongoing news furore about the War in Iraq and whether or not the Government should have waited for a further UN Resolution. Fiona Bradley describes the work in the catalogue:
"The work consists of 76 individual structures bolted to the wall. T one end of the installation, 50 of the structures are arranged like the keys of a classic Olivetti Lettera typewrite, each printed with one of the letters of the QWERTY keyboard, complete with return key and space bar. Around the other three sides, the remaining 26 structures are evenly spaced in a single line to spell out the classic learn-to-type sentence 'the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.' The structures are all blue - Ford blue - with the exception of the return key, which is Mercedes red, and the typeface in which the letters on them are printed in Univers 55." (Fiona Bradley, 'General Assembly' in Simon Patterson. High Noon. Edinburgh, Fruitmarket, 2005. ISBN 0947912886. p.10).