Edinburgh Printmakers

A solo exhibition by highly acclaimed Canadian artist Derek Michael Besant, presented by Edinburgh Printmakers as part of Edinburgh Art Festival.

 

Derek Michael Besant RCA is a Canadian multi-media artist who works in advanced and sometimes unorthodox technologies associated with the billboard industry. His exhibitions and large-scale public art installations have transformed the facades of buildings in Toronto, London, New York and Vienna.

 

In a new body of work created specifically for Edinburgh and Edinburgh Printmakers, Besant considers how the eye depends on the brain to assemble the data we observe to construct what we see. Through the process of developing the work for this exhibition, Besant researches the idea that one part of our brain “sees”, while another part "reads".

 

To construct this exhibition Besant photographed and surveyed members of the Edinburgh Printmakers community, creating a series of intimate images that allow the possibility of recognition, familiarity and identity by the audience.

 

“I have no preconceived ideas other than this strategy that I am hoping will coalesce to form a kind of film script with a cast that writes the lines they will speak. Everyone has two selves. The exhibition will reveal both. One, we wear outward, which is the look we project to others, heard in our voices, our body language as individuals. The other, we wear inside, which has an interior voice and conceals thoughts, desires and fears. Together, these two selves work at revealing and concealing our thought processes and identity of who we are.” - Derek Michael Besant

 

 

Tue-Sat, 10am-6pm