A few weekends ago, I went to this Duff House, an 18th century mansion in Banff (the original Banff) that operates as a country gallery. As a museum that houses historical and temporary exhibitions and features how the house was maintained, it’s almost as interesting as places like the Frick Collection where the highlight is always the house itself and the mausoleum affect of entombed interior designs. 

Opening that day was a new exhibition, Hurricane Lamb, that brought in artists and printmakers from Gray’s School of Art and Peacock Visual Arts. Proposing itself as an exhibition that drew its inspiration from the house and its history, and featuring a mix of emerging and established artists including Michael Agnew, Andrew Cranston, David McCracken, Georgia Russell, Adam Dant, Lennox Dunbar, Paul Housley, and Donald Urquhart, Hurricane Lamb came off as a strange house guest in Duff Manor. 

The works disappeared into the walls, which were seemingly more accustomed to hosting larger gilded frames of a more ornamental nature. The history of the building was supposedly an inspiration, but not much consideration with the physical building itself was apparent.

While the works were certainly made in contemporary times, the assumption that contemporary art is strictly time-based reveals itself as an incredibly awkward display of an exhibition that appeared more like a student show in one of their rich uncle’s side rooms, possibly the library, as there was also suppose to be a connection about collaborations between artists and writers. 

A good initiative, though could have been more carefully considered, especially in light of now seeing Kate Davis’s response to Glasgow Museum’s Collection, Peace at Last!, currently up at GOMA. As the best thing I’ve seen at GOMA since arriving four months ago, Davis’ exhibition absorbs, reinterprets, and re-envisions artworks by Jo Spence, de Goya, along with printed materials related to Christabel Pankhurst and the suffragettes movement into a coherently precise exhibition. 

Image Information: Kate Davis and Faith Wilding, courtesy of the Artists and Sorcha Dallas, 2010

Challenging the role of museums, as archives for objects that shift and complicate our understanding of histories, Davis succinctly and methodically brings together works spanning over 200 years into an engaging conversation with each other and leaves space to engage with multiple readings of past, present, and future. In doing so as questions rather than definites, Peace at Last! (which refers to the text on an anti-suffrage postcard), actually opens up new territories between history as archive and history as lived, and offers a thoughtful interpretation towards possibly reconciling with our various dominant discourses. 

Hurricane Lamb runs until the end of October. Check Duff House for admission and opening times. 

Peace at Last! runs until October 16. Check GOMA for times.