Emotional Need: Adam Lewis Jacob

Collective Gallery, Edinburgh until July 2

www.collectivegallery.net

TAKE a bracing walk up Calton Hill to the Collective Gallery, currently in the throes of renovating and remaking the Playfair Observatory complex as the gallery’s future home, and stop for Adam Lewis Jacob’s look at the political satire of cartoonist Donald Rooum. Jacob reinvestigates the anarchist cartoonist’s work, largely populated by his short-tempered anarchist, Wildcat, and the intellectual stork, Free-Range Egg Head, through a new film based around six interviews the artist did with the cartoonist. Snaking around the temporary exhibition space, a soft sculpture patchworked in collaboration with Katy White, with snippets of Jacob’s Rooum research and images and inspiration from the artist’s own interest in DIY, fanzines and the idea of adolescent rebellion. There is work from Rooum on the wall, relating to his longtime production of Wildcat cartoons for Freedom press, alongside many comic strips themselves.

Adam Lewis Jacob, who graduated from Glasgow School of Art with an MFA and now lives in the city, produces non-linear, fragmentary videos frequently questioning the status quo. It’s a clean leap to Rooum, who became an anarchist at the age of 16 and remained so, despite the reassurance, he once said, of the local Labour party (to whom his somewhat concerned father belonged) that all the best Labour politicians were anarchists in their youth. Both artists explore, loosely, the definitions of anarchy, often misrepresented or misunderstood, and its basic aim of dismantling governmental hegemony for the benefit of a self-regulated, cooperative – and there’s the rub – relationship between individuals.