Miscellany
Robert Bailey
David Beattie
Andrew Bracey
Milo Brennan
Jemma Egan
Mark Harasimowicz
Naomi Kashiwagi
Richard Kendrick
David Martin
Richard Shields
Outlet is delighted to present Miscellany, a group show of recent work from ten UK based practitioners. The selected works offers an insight into the differing approaches and creative processes employed by the artists. By not imposing a 'thematic thread' on the exhibition, this
seemingly random grouping allows for individual and collective discoveries to be made within the space.
Robert Bailey is a Manchester based artist who continues to explore the gaps between figuration, sculptural form and his own restrained illustrative language. For the work in Miscellany, Bailey has carefully constructed a mini environment through manipulation and presentation.
David Beattie is a Dublin based artist whose sculptural manipulations remain minimal. The use of movement, image, sound and physics combine to create unlikely alliances. In this sense, he combines materials as much as he creates relationships between objects usually foreign to each other. These entities, in a newly installed union, remain autonomous in their formal economy. Incorporating an eclectic array of found-objects, he utilizes anything from electric motors to a child's snare drum. Thoroughly inventive in his reapplication of once redundant domestic objects and technologies, Beattie then reconstitutes these elements into unique creations.
Andrew Bracey is an artist based in Manchester who works within the realms of painting, sculpture and animation. Hustler is a reborn/redundant piece of site-specific art work made specifically for this Miscellany. Bracey re-imagined possibilities for the pool table in the previous Outlet space by painting the balls in an absurd, mock camouflage pattern. In the new space they remain in the shadows of the space, almost un-noticed and modest like any good pool hustler.
Milo Brennan is a Bristol based artist whose work is an ongoing investigation into the boundary between visual legibility and illegibility. His use of found objects results in simple abstraction and reduction of established printed forms of communication such as cut comic strips and altered advertisements and packaging.
Jemma Egan is an artist based in Liverpool whose practice usually takes inspiration from the simple, everyday things or situations that she comes across. Although the work varies in content, pieces have an intangible 'something' that relates pieces to one another. Perhaps due to the inherently playful and humorous nature of the work, the artist frequently seems to develop an almost irrational obsession for the items that it features. The aim is to then share this with the viewer so they can gain some of the joy or intrigue that Egan does from the items.
Mark Harasimowicz is an artist based in Manchester. His recent work has involved the manipulation and construction of geometric grids, combined with subtle disruptive graphic marks. The resulting visual tensions, optical shifts and stutters look to play around with the gap between the eye and the paper. With the aid of computer programs, photocopiers and inkjet printers to fabricate the grids, Harasimowicz creates an element of chance where the technology becomes susceptible to malfunctions - causing paper jams and miss-alignments. The level of influence the artist has on this process and how it contrasts with the intervention is key to the creation of these small-scale, often fragile, works.
Naomi Kashiwagi is a Manchester based artist who often challenges the inter-relationships and boundaries between art, music and language. The starting point for this series of work was the notion of 'Art Now', a common phrase used to describe current art practices, commonly used, commercially, to title and define books. It also resonates with the language of consumerism. Through anagrammatic re-appropriation, the political and protesting inherent slogan emerges, ART NOW, NOT WAR, also resonating with consumerist slogans. When used together as a subversive slogan the phrase can be rearranged to form 'ART WAR, NOT NOW' and 'WAR ART, NOT NOW'.
Richard Kendrick is currently a Manchester based artist, who, for Miscellany is showing a selection of pieces from his body of work 'Retro'. Here the artist plays with redesign and transition of materials that tend to be discarded or obsolete. These unassuming sculptural works are fabricated and presented to test their form and the space they inhabit.
David Martin is a Manchester based artist. The work presented for Miscellany is part of a larger body of research work that focuses on light. Martin has allowed these compositions to develop naturally, without a preconceived result in mind. They are connected to an imaginary landscape, and the light within it.
Richard Shields is a Manchester based artist, who is aware of who he thinks his work is for and who sees it, what is considered valid contemporary art and what others consider to be proper art. Shields works in a number of mediums he finds convenient or accessible. A level of skill is applied that in itself attracts a varied Art loving audience to a debate on worth and worthlessness. The artists interest in what is common and what is rare or precious as object and as Art is inherent in the three works presented in Miscellany.
