17 May 2012

Matt's Gallery 2012-13 Programme

Current Exhibitions:
Gallery One: Willie Doherty, Photo/text/85/92
Gallery Two: Nathaniel Mellors, Ourhouse E3 Feat. BAD COPY
18 April – 27 May 2012

Willie Doherty, Photo/text/85/92
Matt’s Gallery hosts an exhibition of Willie Doherty’s black and white photographs from 1985–1992, which have rarely been exhibited before. These early works developed conceptual and formal strategies that resided in Doherty’s practice over the next two decades to the present. In particular, they foreshadow his distinctive use of voiceover and disjointed narrative in the body of the video works he has subsequently produced.

Doherty’s ongoing concerns with the complexities and contradictions of contested terrain were firmly established early on. These works probed the tensions and anxieties of what was visible and invisible, of what could be said and what could not. The works in the exhibition reveal something of the social and political conditions of the period that saw the entrance of the Irish Republican movement into the political process and negotiations with the British government over the North of Ireland. They also bear traces of the artistic possibilities and debates at the time of production, which sought to politicise conceptual art practice.

The specific content of these works – of boundary building and the pervasive nature of surveillance, the apparent incommensurability of polarized political factions and the scars these divisions leave on the landscape – remain relevant today.

Willie Doherty was born 1959 in Derry and currently lives and works in Donegal. His work in both photography and video has been shown internationally in institutions since the 1980s. In 2011 his work was the subject of solo exhibitions at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville and Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane. The artist is currently completing a new video projection to be included in dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel in 2012. In 2013, his video work will be the subject of a survey exhibition at the Museo de Arte of the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá.

A publication accompanying the exhibition is available free to all gallery visitors with text by Declan Long. The exhibition is supported by Arts Council England.


Nathaniel Mellors, Ourhouse E3 Feat. BAD COPY
Ourhouse E3 feat. BAD COPY is Nathaniel Mellors’ third exhibition at Matt’s Gallery. It includes the latest episode of Mellors’ absurdist video series Ourhouse Episode 3, The Cure of Folly and a new animatronic installation, BAD COPY, developed from a double character played by Roger Sloman in The Cure of Folly.

Previously in Ourhouse...
A mysterious male form has appeared in the front room of the bohemian Maddox-Wilson family home. The imposing figure is a looming, white-haired man wearing a white tracksuit and trainers. It barely moves. The family does not recognise it as a human being. They refer to it as ‘The Object’ and struggle for words in its presence. The Object’s inanimate appearance is superficial; it is able to control language inside the house. At night The Object appears in the library where it begins to eat and regurgitate the family’s books. The specific pages The Object consumes affect the story; the family is forced to play out different episodes under the influence of the books The Object has been eating.

Ourhouse Episode 3, The Cure of Folly...
At the beginning of Ourhouse Episode 3, The Cure of Folly we see The Object consuming books on Flemish painting, including images of Hieronymus Bosch’s masterworks The Haywain(1510) and The Extraction of the Stone of Madness (1494). The latter depicts a surgeon removing a stone from the forehead of his willing subjugate; the work presents the abstract ’madness’ as object (pebble) within a hermetic narrative of castration. Following The Object’s consumption of these pages the house (Ourhouse), its patriarchal 1970’s owner Charles ‘Daddy’ Maddox-Wilson (Richard Bremmer) and his glamorous younger wife ‘Babydoll’ (Gwendoline Christie) are threatened by a newly materialised group of ’medievalists’. A disconsolate cluster of men are rounded up and led, on a haywain, towards the house by the pregnant, feminist mystic ‘The Hek’ (Honeysuckle Weeks) and her hench-women Xantho and Sigourney. They "want the stone of madness"... The Cure of Folly also features Roger Sloman as ‘Doctor Tony’, a pre-reformation sexist who puppeteers his own alter-ego ‘Father Griffin’. They are the basis for the new animatronic installation BAD COPY.

In this, Mellors’ fourth instalment of the Ourhouse series, the membranes between fantasy, reality and the production and consumption of narrative become even further conflated than before. A publication accompanying the exhibition is available free to all gallery visitors. The exhibition is supported by Arts Council England and the Mondriaan Foundation.

Matt’s Gallery Programme 2012-13:

20 June – 29 July 2012
Gallery One: Fiona Crisp, Negative Capability: The Stourhead Cycle
Gallery Two: Jennet Thomas, SCHOOL OF CHANGE

5 September – 18 November 2012
Revolver, a curatorial collaboration between Robin Klassnik and Richard Grayson

30 January – 24 March 2013
Gallery One: Susan Hiller
Gallery Two: Mike Nelson