Robbie Bushe IV

Above: Detail from 'Application Day'. Below: Application Day.

It has been a busy weekend with Friday evening spent at The Nomads Tent seeing the wonderful; She'koyokh klezmer and Balkan Band. 
On Saturday, I returned to Edinburgh to catch the last hour of Robbie Bushe's exhibition 'Invasions and Excavations' at the Open Eye Gallery.
Robbies work, produced over the last eighteen months, not only explores the layers of the city, but also personal layers of family,  politics and work.

Below: The Writers Group.

Robbie's work has evolved over the decades from large canvases with perspective warped to catch all of the available angles of his visual narrative, to these new works that are incredibly detailed, a succession of vignettes and scenes.

Above: The File Managers' Minions.

Jewel like, each image is a jigsaw of miniatures forged into a mirror of the complexity of modern life, a cacophony of lives overlaying each other, some touching each other, but mostly in isolation.

There is a futility, a madness and a love; a layering of humanity and emotion in these works that bring to mind Mexican votives and sometimes even comic strips, especially with the use of speech bubbles in 'New Hadrian's Wall', Placards in 'The Space Utilisation Manager and the Chasm of Doom' and the division of space and action throughout the exhibition.
These works are not only pulling together in the embrace of the composition  a mass of emotion, action and thought, but also different genres of contemporary art and art tradition.

 Below: detail from New Hadrian's Wall

Above: The Space Utilisation Manager and the Chasm of Doom