FRANCE-LISE MCGURN

McGurn’s work often utilises her experiences of the city and this exhibition’s title derives from a place from Glasgow’s near past: legendary, and now defunct, chain store What Everyone Wants (formerly What Every Woman Wants) founded in 1971 by Vera and Gerald Weisfeld in Glasgow. The business was built on marketing London fashion at affordable prices and the company quickly became a landmark of the UK high street in the 80’s. The flagship shop in Glasgow’s city centre is now demolished. The artist jokes, What Everyone Wants is gone.

The installation mixes wall paintings with works on canvas, and the bright, ebullient colours of 80’s and 90’s window displays and shop advertisements filter into both. McGurn has drawn from various mundane sources from recent history to develop a set of motifs which emerge intuitively from her calligraphic brushstrokes: British film Mr Jolly Lives Next Door, 1988; flop American rom-com Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, 1993; advertisements from the Yellow Pages telephone directory; and the immersive video MINUCODE, 1968, by Marta Minujín which documents four New York cocktail parties. Fluid shapes and figures echo and repeat across the installation speaking to a collapse of time and the recurrent movements of quotidian cycles – day to night, sober to drunk, turned-off to turned-on. Phone numbers, titles and other words are also scrawled down the sides of works and across their painted surfaces. These resemble shopping lists, the cursive on a CD or tape, a message noted down while on the phone, or a joke in a toilet cubicle. The necessary but intuitive nature of these writings speak to the everyday, un-precious but romantic atmosphere of the show.