Sorcha Dallas

A convex mirror throws back your warped image from the corner of a space. You could be standing on the platform at Cowcaddens watching yourself waiting for the tube, or standing in Cezary Bodzianowski’s exhibition at Sorcha Dallas Gallery. Next to the silvery slice of a reflective globe, a mocked-up CCTV screen instantly replays and records where you would be if you were waiting for that train, but instead Bodzianowski’s there on the platform, cheekily doffing his hat to the camera and to you.

This simple, silly action is one of the new video works that the Polish-based artist has made for this exhibition, four confident and effortless responses to the situation he found himself in – an artist in a foreign country asked to make work. His ‘Chapeau Beaux’ works perfectly in this context (just around the corner from St. Enoch’s underground station), effortlessly twisting an everyday situation into a clever performance. The prying eye of the camera becomes an extension of the artist’s super ego, an externalised and mocked-up self awareness that becomes complicit in this narcissistic tryst. The viewer is merely an onlooker.

In the gallery next door, a Scottish living room is turned inside out: if the gallery is on the inside then the projected living room should be out in the street. As the familiar sound of the BBC Scotland news report plays on the screen, a dark figure moves behind the curtain. Is it the artist as a loafing fool or psycho? You decide.