THE tangled history and powerful imagery of the Jacobite period is rich territory for Calum Colvin’s thoughtful and clever show.
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery has now invited Calum Colvin to contribute a commentary to its Jacobite collection. Artists’ “responses” to historical works are generally lamentable. Not so with Colvin. He works by creating assemblages and then photographing them to make a single image and in his Ossian series, exhibited at the SNPG some years ago, he provided a subtle analysis of Scottish identity and the myths from which it is constructed: voices of the past, distorted as Chinese whispers as they echo faintly down the generations. So the Jacobites are the perfect subject for his art of allusion. Packing past and present in a single image, it illuminates both.
Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/lifestyle/culture/art/the-jacobite-art-that-faces-up-to-the-past-1-3962244