PAINTING, SCULPTURE AND PRINT

The Intermedia space is a slippery fish, but it is usually worth trying to land the thing. The exhibition by Kendall Koppe and Douglas Morland is a case in point. The work on show deals with aspects of subjectivity that are difficult to represent: drives, urges, disorders and other ghosts in the machine that are impossible to grasp.

Koppe turns Dr Jean Martin Charcot’s early photographs of hysterical women, for instance, into very seductive screen prints – the decorative and formal elements of (re)presenting the image of an ecstatic yet tortured figure dominating the prints. Elsewhere, in two large self-portraits, the artist presents himself in similar poses, arms raised, welcoming and repelling an unseen force or attacker. In this diptych the figure is represented as split, barred from itself by an externalised void that fills the space between the works and is held in the upturned hands of the artist.

Morland’s sculptures and paintings also deal with absence, with references to the sublime and to spiritualism filling the gap. In one painting a Promethius-style rod jabs at inert objects, re-animating dead things. Elsewhere a grave-shaped form is covered with a tablecloth, and an unearthly light leaks out from under the construction.

Intermedia, CCA, Glasgow, until Sat 2 Feb