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Body, you are not me
Oliver Doe
Abject 2 Gallery
2nd Floor, Breeze Creatives
Exhibition open 3rd - 7th July, 11am - 5pm
'Newcastle based transmedia artist Oliver Doe presents an exhibition of new and recent works, accompanied by a limited mini-publication, as part of Curious Festival 2018's visual art programme.
Since 2014, Oliver's research and practice has been centred around queer visibility and representations of queer bodies, and he has previously partnered with organisations such as Northern Pride and The Albert Kennedy Trust. His work has been developed from personal experience of queer identity and the intersections between body and identity that lie in between binaries. Oliver's work takes transmedia forms, using painting, text, sculpture, and the found object (as well as the less well-defined spaces in between those) to explore ideas around the queer potential of abstraction. Reduced and abstracted bodily forms explore the changing boundaries of queer bodies and the possibility to recognise the body as a site of queer sexuality.
The accompanying mini-publication includes a selection of Oliver's new poems, which provide context for the paintings and objects.'
More info can be found online: http://www.oliverdoe.com
REALITY CHECK
Lucien Anderson / Jon Cornbill / Oliver Doe / Emily Garvey / Louie Pegna / Alice Rout / Helen Shaddock / Olivia Turner
Preview: Friday 13th October, 6-8:30pm
Dates: 14th October – 28th October 2017 (Wed-Sat 12-5pm)
The NewBridge Project : Gateshead
232-240 High Street, Gateshead, NE8 1AQ
Reality Check is a new exhibition bringing together works by eight early-career artists, resulting from The NewBridge Project’s 2016-2017 Graduate Programme in partnership with Newcastle University.
Reality Check explores the role and identity of the artist and its connection to the everyday, engaging with a broad range of societal contexts from manual to emotional labour and introspective to extrospective ways of being and seeing.
The launch of Reality Check will mark the launch of The NewBridge Project : Gateshead, a new gallery and studio space on Gateshead High Street.
Lucien Anderson’s eclectic practice is tied together with the methodical approach of an engineer, replicating rudimentary research & development and prototyping. Collating spontaneous video footage, he attempts to coax out a rationale or theme, whilst exploring the day-to-day habits of the artist as a human being. Helen Shaddock’s work presents a similarly honest yet raw account of trivial everyday activities from the point of view of a narrator. Through live stream-of-consciousness writing, Shaddock reveals the narrator’s meandering thoughts; dubiety, tiredness, relationships, and the pressures of modern life.
Emily Garvey constructs otherworldly multi-media works that elaborate on ideas of escapism from modern reality, pulling from both popular culture and introspection. Focusing on identity and self-doubt and deprecation, Garvey presents an animated character turning his inner turmoil into moments of joy. Alice Rout offers work that is embedded in dissociation, allowing both the artist and audience to project their fantasies upon a vast virtual world, manifesting in the form of a blank avatar. This projection allows us to examine our reality from an objective viewpoint, lost within Rout’s huge virtual landscape.
Jon Cornbill roots his practice in social, cultural and political diagnosis, continuously questioning our ever-changing systems and communities. Cornbill responds by playing with both scale and the values we hold in regard to tradition, in both artistic and social terms, to create a sense of difference. Louie Pegna also aims to make an alien landscape out of the familiar, using uneasy images and sounds to create a sense of alienation, and directly referencing a pop-cultural idea of aliens through audio-visual tropes. Pegna’s works are playful, and invite the audience to decode a diverse mix of imagery and ideas.
Oliver Doe’s work looks both inwardly and at wider social circumstances to examine ways in which the queer body is manifested in broader societal and cultural contexts. Reduced to essential elements, his works interweave an ephemeral trace of the body with subtle queer coding and suggestiveness. Olivia Turner’s work also attempts to articulate the corporeal, focusing on the hands as communicators of non-verbal gestures, and as sensory sockets for perceiving the body. Her current practice explores the effects of mitochondrial diseases on the senses, and explores alternative modes of perception and communication.
Reality Check will be the inaugural exhibition in The NewBridge Project : Gateshead, a formerly vacant shop unit on Gateshead High Street. The space has been transformed into a base that will be home to NewBridge Gallery, which will host a rolling programme of contemporary art exhibitions and commissions; studio spaces for artists at any stage of their career; and, our pioneering new graduate development programme, The Collective Studio, a collaboration with Newcastle University’s Institute for Creative Art Practice.
Reality Check is supported by the Newcastle University Institute for Creative Arts Practice and Arts Council England.
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Artists’ Biographies:
Lucien Anderson (b.1992, Huddersfield) creates work that incorporates installation, sculpture, video, digital image and everyday object. Anderson was awarded the John Christie Prize in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Gillian Dickinson North East Sculptor Award. Recent exhibitions include I’ve got too much on my plate, The Northern Charter, Newcastle; As Above So Below, Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Allenheads; and Hollow Horse, XL Gallery, Newcastle.
Jon Cornbill (b. 1993, Gateshead) works between video, sculpture, performance and installation. Recent exhibitions include I’ve got too much on my plate, The Northern Charter, Newcastle; Moving on Up, Moving on Out, NewBridge Project, Newcastle; XMAS DINNER, M I L K Gallery, Newcastle; and Night of the Museums, Turbo Gallery, Warsaw.
Oliver Doe (b.1994, London) is a transmedia artist, writer and curator, whose practice focuses on queerness in visual culture. Recent exhibitions include You’re Reading Into It, Vane, Newcastle; Provocations, ICW, Blackpool; In Plain Sight, 35 Chapel Walk, Sheffield; and Distant Bodies, System Gallery, Newcastle.
Emily Garvey (b.1993, Barnsley) is an artist who works with 3D modelling and video software to create digital alternate realities. Recent exhibitions include Roots and Wings, House of Blah Blah, Middlesbrough and Sunday Screening I, Platform Southwark, London.
Louie Pegna (b. 1992, Bristol) is an installation artist and printmaker living in Glasgow, currently studying MLitt Fine Art Practice at the Glasgow School of Art. Recent exhibitions include Children of Tomorrow, Galleri Andromeda, Aarhus, Hollow Horse, XL Gallery, Newcastle, and After A Daily Century of Available Real, Splab Gallery, Aarhus.
Alice Rout (b.1994, Suffolk) is an artist based in Newcastle working with video, installation, text and sound. Recent exhibitions include ULTRA SUNRISE, SET Studios, London; Moving On Up, Moving On Out, The NewBridge Project, Newcastle; and Fünf Wochen Unendlicher Spass, Pathos München, Munich.
Helen Shaddock (b.1986, Dewsbury) works with video, sound, writing, installation, sculpture and performance. Shaddock recently completed a Spoken Word residency at The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada. Recent exhibitions include Flash Fwd, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Canada; Everything will be alright, Cheeseburn, Northumberland; A lot can happen in a day, TURF Projects, London.
Olivia Turner (b.1992, Newcastle) is an interdisciplinary artist undertaking a practice-led PhD at Newcastle University. She is currently artist in residence at the Wellcome Centre for Mitochondrial Research. Recent exhibitions include Valence, Vane, Newcastle; Moving on Out, Moving on Up, NewBridge Project, Newcastle; and Glasgow International (2016).
http://thenewbridgeproject.com/events/reality-check/
‘You’re Reading Into It’ brings together bodies of work by seven emerging LGBTQ+ artists, curated by artist Oliver Doe. The work focuses on queer readings of Minimalist art and portrayals of LGBTQ+ experience through a minimal abstract lens. Seeking to challenge the machismo often associated with Minimalist art and reclaim a queerness in that visual language, ‘You’re Reading Into It’ highlights the importance of queer and radical feminist issues in the development of contemporary art.
Rachel Ara’s work makes direct references to High Minimalism’s sexism and the movement’s ignorance of women artists such as Ana Mendieta, as well as gendered pricing structures in art and the tragedy of the HIV/AIDS crisis to which she lost several friends. Charlotte Cullen seeks to reinsert the individual into Minimalist formalism’s abstract removal of the artist’s hand by employing a feminist sense of craft. This contrasts the ‘masculine’ industrial fibreglass insulation and aluminium used in the sculptures in order to question binaries of gender and sex. Garth Gratrix also utilises materials often associated with Minimalism – household paints, concrete, and metal – but turns this machismo on its head by playfully examining their ‘queer’ properties through language, innuendo and slang.
Oliver Doe’s paintings question queer visibility in visual culture, employing opaque gloss paint over translucent, skin-like nylon grounds. Abstracting figures into confused, amorphous and sometimes invisible bodily forms, Doe critiques formalist hard-edge painting through an inquisitive queer lens. These are well complemented by Singaporean artist Daniel Chong’s intimate mirrored sculptures, Safe Spaces, which critique his country’s criminalisation of homosexuality. These laser-cut works present the abstracted spaces between embracing figures, removing the bodies and their associations from sight, whilst reflecting the figure of the viewer within.
Tessa Hawkes’ practice plays with object-hood, materiality and narratives, working across a diverse range of media to explore closeness, balance and unalike objects. Her choices of ‘things’ are purposefully colourful and fun; working from collections of images and objects informed by industrial spaces and queer culture, playing with her own queerness and aesthetic views while working through formal methods. Liam Fallon’s sculptural work plays with similar visual codes, deeply invested in the objects’ properties and their relationships with queer coding. Using a diverse and colourful range of materials, Fallon explores and makes reference to subtle forms of queerness and sexual subcultures within pop culture.
http://vane.org.uk/exhibitions/youre-reading-into-it-queering-contemporary-minimalism
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