Catherine Yass 'High Wire'Catherine Yass 'High Wire'

October 2008

ArtAngel installed 'High Wire' by Catherine Yass in the German Gymnasium in October 2008 for a five week exhibition.

A multi-screen film and video installation, 'High Wire' was filmed at the Red Road housing scheme in North Glasgow in 2007. When it was built in the early 1960s, Red Road was the highest social housing in Europe, a triumph of the city planners' dreams to rebuild the city. Into the void between the planners' concrete dreams, another kind of dreamer, the French high-wire artist Didier Pasquette, steps out - at first gracefully, then hesitantly, and then he stops...

Catherine Yass's films generate startling new perspectives on the urban environment, capturing familiar sights from highly unusual vantage points. 'High Wire' is the ultimate expression of her interest in the vertiginous view. It juxtaposes the containment of the concrete blocks and the modernist idealism of streets reaching into the sky, with the self-contained mental space of the high wire artist and the freedom of walking in the air.