Review / 24 February 2026 / By: Eileen Slightly / ★ ★ ★ ★
Review of "Fire, Flood and Calamity"
In the gothic schoolroom there are still boys misbehaving. The higher-than-eye-level windows of 5 Washington Street were fenestrated a century-or-so ago to prevent the distraction of Victorian schoolchildren, and today two tall young men reach past the work to write their tags on the January evening condensation. Furtively, they look over their shoulders in perfect symmetry and meet my eyes. ## What do they think I am? I suppose that at its least resolved and most base, the image of the critic can be transparently superimposed over that of a schoolma’am… Or, in this world of the degraded word, perhaps the critic might now be something more akin to a supply teacher who doles out advice from the standpoint of nowhere.
The tall boys were reaching past Celeste Guinchat’s Pardonne-moi de t’idealise: two dolls hollowed out and painted white, you could see that inside their bodies’ keyholes, there was a flashing green light. One brunette and the other shocking blonde, both had the proportions of a Barbie, but their abdomens had the articulated carapace of a doomsday locust. Their eyelids were made of the same clay and mohair as the widened distal epiphysis of their radii, such that the ossified and the flesh could be read over each other. I imagine those 19th century schoolchildren playing with them after the eventual occurrence of their presbyterian-coded eschatological event. In 1889- the year the schoolroom was built- the possibility of socialist revolution was a real fear/hope, preached with the same regularity and fervour as judgment day. The apocalyptic predictions of the “Scottish Nostradamus,” from which the title of this group show is taken, come from a semi-mythological figure who probably lived at the end of the 16th century and has been credited with a number of prophecies. Perhaps the most evocative is the prediction of “fire, flood, and calamity,” which seems uncannily to have been realised after the construction of the ninth bridge across the Ness in the form of the Piper Alpha disaster- a preventable fire that claimed the lives of 167 workers. The number of survivors could have been much higher had the company Occidental- the safety practices of which were overseen only by the Tory government- turned off the flow of oil after the first explosion on the site. Instead, the lives of 167 men were needlessly lost in an event which has come to represent the sacrifice of Scottish workers' lives at the behest of Westminster’s capital.
In this repurposed room, holding an intensely historical press release, I wished for the augural nature of late 19th century socialism born of the radical moment before the bread and circus of liberal reforms. Listening to Coinneach, we are reminded that the augural is not opposed to the industrial, but realised through it. We can find some contemporary relief when we look to the future, as long as we ground ourselves in the prophecy that is foretold through the logic of capital.
The difficulty of representing the interconnections of political entities is represented by the incomplete display of Jacob Heaton’s maps, who has connected dozens of radical/militarised political groups of the 20th century in a manner that recalls the paranoid diagrams of Simon Dovey’s Eye of the Chickenhawk, a timely, legendary and schizoid exposition of the link between American serial killings and international child trafficking and abuse. Like much ‘conspiracy’ writing, the void at the centre of Dovey’s analysis is motivation- what makes them do this evil? Without attention to overarching historical forces, these diagrams, the world becomes disparate, flat, incomprehensible.
Talking of the incomprehensible, I overheard an older man saying he was ‘tired of the whole nomad gallery thing.’ As if young artists should wait their turn to be shown in the ever-dwindling number of galleries? As we ought not explore our cities, find locations on gumtree and put work in there? ### You shouldn’t make a complaint like that unless you are going to write Johnny Brown a cheque. I also overheard a woman tell Fleur Connor that she ought to make eighty versions of her painting ‘Bitch thinks she fly, she can’t even get off the ground by herself.’. “Do it,” the woman says to her, “I can sell it to those freaks in new york…” Zombie formalist hawkers in 2026? it’s more likely than you think… On a canvas slightly larger than a large ipad, Connor has gouached a green-grey sky split by a Lockheed jet. Describing herself as a ‘screen-cracked impressionist’, I can’t help but agree with that woman- I’d like to see her depressedly Monet-out on the LED simulations of the military-industrial complex.
Above Daniel Zeballo’s mysterious commodity critique- the pale bricks with its cryptic Michael Craig-Martin-ass material list- on the opposing wall, Brown has hung Theo MacKenzie’s Mannequin Head with Bonnet. Looking at his simple, smooth grey paint is both satisfying and sad, like the tumblr moodboards from which he lifts inspiration. The bonnet is a nostalgic and fashionable item, something that would be sported by a member of his twee-ker set, or perhaps most likely, by his muse and sometime Hollywood Superstar Contributor, Floss Crosresley- a woman I picture in my mind’s eye with digital grain, with the instagram filter ‘Tokyo’. An ancient headcovering meant to signal deference to God, the empty desire of the mannequin head painted from tumblr, reminds me of Kracauer’s 1927 essay on the commercialising power of cinema over the subject, ‘Little Shop Girls go to the Movies’.
And now we come to bread and circuses, or panem et circnem, the title of curator Johnny Brown’s photograph, a portrait of a boy. Johnny Brown had found his subject stood, hooded on a freezing cold pond. The child is absorbed in the flashing lights of a machine used in the detection of paranormal spirits, entirely distant from industry, he plays on the blue carpet of a hollowed-out office space. In a place without a trace of history, we are subject only to distraction. I am fascinated by the staged premeditation of the composition, where I feel a very human witness to the ‘measuring and folding of the cloth of time itself’.
On a related and paranoid note: searching for post-modern theory-ghosts of the 90’s, examining nostalgic affect in the year of our lord 2026 is an unutterably miserable waste of time.
Tying together this corner of the gothic schoolroom are these beautiful objects made by the young that will not prevent the cycles of fire, flood and calamity. However, their studied difference, personal care and careful attention to history, make good meaning. Johnny Brown putting his own work in the show could be read as blurring the lines between self promotion and collective display, but I read it more as an assertion of:
- his own curatorial voice
- the city of Glasgow as a significant site for the development of a loose collectivity of young European artists who regularly show together, sometimes- as on this occasion- drawing quite the crowd.
