LOCAL

Jane Beveridge arrived in Dubai in 2002 from Hong Kong via Edinburgh and Brighton, joined the art department at Dubai College, and has been Head of Art there since 2007. LOCAL is her first solo show, and the title is both subject and form: DUBAI is a five-letter word, as is LOCAL, as are TRUST, TRUTH, VOICE, GRACE, ALIVE, TOUCH — words she has been collecting for years, drawn to the limit Frank Ramsey identified as the edge of human cognitive complexity. The work is built from what she sees: swimming pools with their ordered mosaics, construction sites, dusty haberdasheries that have been on the same corner since 2002. Corrugated cardboard, concrete, sand, rust, tangled wires, weathered wood. Mixed-media assemblages that combine painting with mosaic, textiles, found objects and concrete — what she calls "five-letter-word adverts." The repetition is deliberate and meditative: gluing tiles, stitching, wrapping, knotting, the same gesture over and over. A quiet form of devotion to a city that most visitors walk past on the way to somewhere more spectacular.