Long generous article on new works by Incredible Talking Cat co-owner SGB, depictions of "a [city] where no one without relatives or a personal connection to the place would likely vacation or visit":

"Borda's pictures are not a catalogue, and she is not a journalist. Her photographs are compositions with their own language and the exhibition is a conceptual artwork and an ode to the area. There is a payback in terms of civic pride, however. 'Like the Antiques Roadshow, my pictures assign value to things,' she says.

In that her alien accent is helpful, as is the legitimisation of an RIAS platform. Three years on from her East Kilbride residency, reviews of that project are still appearing in the US and Canada.

Borda believes that Scotland is missing a trick in restricting its tourism pitch to the history of Bruce, Wallace and Mary Queen of Scots. And she is absolutely sincere.

'There is a real nostalgia for the 1950s and 1960s, and an appetite for cultural tourism to see public art. Gregory's Girl is still very popular in North America - there could be a market for timeshares in Cumbernauld.'"

From the RIAS website:

"For the realisation of this project, [Borda] has endeavoured to create both a photo archive and a conceptual artwork of the Glenrothes urbanscape. In the production of the artwork, the juxtaposition of ‘ordinary’ images of landscape and objects regularly decontextualise the geography so a viewer might read the pictures in relation to colour, form, and composition; however, the images are themselves actual representations of a specific location. Influenced by the work of photographers Stephen Shore, Geoffrey James, Lewis Baltz and William Eggleston, the suburban attributes of Glenrothes have become part of an interplay between the familiar and the uncommon."
- posted by cjb @ 8:40 AM