Ikon presented High Noon, a major exhibition by British artist Simon Patterson, encompassing a range of media including painting, wall drawing, installation, sound, sculpture and film. Organised in collaboration with The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, the show displayed a selection of early pieces alongside others not exhibited before in the UK and new work.

Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1996, Patterson has established an international reputation for work involving wordplay in order to manipulate notions of identification and classification. The artist links distinct categories or systems through analogy, with language playing a key role.

High Noon features Patterson’s seminal work The Great Bear, (1992). In this piece, the artist has substituted the names of the stations on the London Underground map with prominent figures from various walks of life. For example, the Northern Line is named after film actors, the Jubilee Line after footballers. This renaming reveals a complex range of associations, from the obvious to the absurd – some wittily apparent such as Leicester Square, at the centre of London’s theatre-land being changed to Laurence Olivier and the triangular interconnections of lines at Paddington replaced by Pythagoras. The Great Bear demonstrates Patterson’s fundamental proposition, whereby seemingly random logic is applied to subvert conventional thinking often manifested in the formats of maps, charts and diagrams.

A new commission, Time Piece is an evocative, beautifully shot video work. It features two fob watches swinging in and out of synchronisation, their motion taking place against soundtracks of alternate male and female breathing, increasingly urgent through physical exertion. The result is extremely erotic, surprisingly, given the subject matter. UGC also hosted Time Piece as part of the regular film programme.

Simon Patterson also presented a series of coloured smoke grenades, detonated to produce a sequence of spectacular explosions. Plumes of green, blue, red, violet, orange and yellow dramatically animated the otherwise serene landscape of Winterbourne Botanic Garden.

The exhibition is supported by The Elephant Trust, The Foyle Foundation and The Henry Moore Foundation.