Some Assembly Required
Ardra Nair | Archie Ogus | Brandon Pearce | Elizabeth Oughton | Frank Pretorius | Kitty McKay
Preview: Thursday 25 April, 6 – 9pm
26 April – 4 May 2024
Some Assembly Required brings together the work of six Newcastle University MFA students at Slugtown, Newcastle upon Tyne. Featuring new works by Ardra Nair, Frank Pretorius, Elizabeth Oughton, Brandon Pearce, Archie Ogus and Kitty McKay the show makes visible the collaborative nature of group exhibitions, and considers what might be achieved when artists embrace their differences and produce work in divergence.
Eschewing tight thematics, Some Assembly Required explores contrasting relationships towards the purpose of exhibition building and meaning making. The works in this exhibition span a range of media and references; including painting, urban cartographies, and class and queer politics. Through bringing these diverse practices together in this exhibition, the show aims to both flatten the hierarchies of prescribed value, and to adopt the position of a playful experiment into the messiness of curation as creative practice.
Some Assembly Required is situated in a specific moment, within a specific context – acknowledging the loss of many integral art spaces in the North East over recent years. These spaces provide meaningful opportunities for artists to experiment, collaborate and build community, as a place to look and talk about art. Through the steady reduction of spending on the arts, and tighter funding principles, mean that arts practices must increasingly demonstrate its usefulness.
Archie Ogus is an installation artist who primarily works with acrylic paint to create large-scale, site-specific installations which often encompass multiple dimensions extend beyond the canvas. These works take the form of sharp, geometrical murals, layering masking and duct tape along with the paint, resulting in works which spread across walls and floors to reconfigure often overlooked spaces, objects or materials.
Ogus’ work in Some Assembly Required will feature a geometric mural painted directly onto the gallery walls, to transform the space, responding to the works in the show.
Ardra Nair is a painter whose work explores the uncanny and the transformation of the human form into a robotic posthuman phase. Her work harnesses the skills and techniques of oil painting to produce documentative pieces that look almost photorealistic. Nair includes flora and fauna as subjects within her pieces along with human beings, as she wants to present the stance that while animals and plants may differ from us in various ways, these differences do not warrant them being considered in-human; they are simply counterparts which have evolved to adapt to the differences in their environment compared to ours.
Within Some Assembly Required, Ardra Nair will be exhibiting a triptych of oil paintings on canvas depicting realistic imagery. Nair is attempting to overwhelm the audience with the volume of detail in these works, while presenting paintings that encompass three stages of a transformative process within the confines of a single canvas in three different contexts; the head, the arms and the torso.
Brandon Pearce is a multidisciplinary artist who works across sculpture, poetry, and photography to explore working class relationships, and specifically, his personal relationship with his father. Pearce’s work focuses on loss and reconnection, grounded in the exploration of his family heritage. He weaves conversations with his father into the fabric of his work, through both direct dialogue and indirect expression, navigating the complexities of their shared narrative. Working with sculpture and installation often allows Pearce to sustain a deep connection with materials, translating emotional threads into tangible forms.
For Some Assembly Required, Pearce will be investigating themes of working-class relationships through installation. Through exhibiting works of prints and poetry, the work will be delving into contemplations and emotions regarding the artist and his father.
Elizabeth Oughton is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice involves the use of installation, sculpture, ceramics, walking and writing. Oughton’s work is inspired by rock and stone, and the immense time frames of the geological world and the implied histories and narratives inherent in rock. Her work presents a new perspective on how the minerals contained within our bodies, the infrastructure and technologies of our world, as well as the symbolic and aesthetic, all bind us into deep relationships with rock. Oughton expands a phenomenological approach to accepting the liveliness of rock and matter more generally.
For Some Assembly Required, Oughton uses print to explore the idea of the palimpsest in rock time.
Frank Pretorius is an abstract representational artist who often employs traditional materials such as charcoal, ink on paper and oil paints on canvas to explore the process of deconstruction and representational reconstruction of imagery, thus looking into the value and influence of symbolism within the visual arts. Pretorius’ inspiration for his imagery often comes from his adventures in the outdoors, preferably across Africa. He uses his choice of media to capture the light’s elusive quality of transforming figures and landscapes within moments while pursuing snippets of the narrative of life. By securing these ambient intervals of time and securing them on canvas and paper, Pretorius interprets the notion of being conscious of his surroundings in the moment.
For this group show, Pretorius will be displaying a large-scale oil painting on canvas, looking into the artist’s heritage, family and childhood. This painting, among others in his practice, stands as a visual narrative that employs animals in a symbolic manner; in this case, the Hyena stands to represent the dark side of humanity. The artist contrasts this particular symbol with a notion of naivety depicted through the image of a young girl.
Kitty McKay is an interdisciplinary practitioner, whose work encompasses moving image, sound, installation, sculpture, collage, live works, writing and social engagement. Kitty’s approach to practice is often collaborative and open ended, and informed by feminist, queer and crip frameworks for understanding, and overcoming, the ways power constructs place. They often create assemblages of found, low-fi and open-sourced objects and media.
For Some Assembly Required, Kitty is making-kin with parasites, namely bedbugs, locating them in public space, bringing them into the gallery in the form of new moving-image and sculptural work. Using the bus as a familiar public site, Kitty identifies parasitic relationships as disruptive, monstrous, spatial, potentially queer, inherently political, and as something maybe to embrace.