WORKPLACE: Final week: Cath Campbell / Richard Rigg at Workplace Gateshead

Final Week: the 2 solo exhibitions at Workplace Gateshead Richard Rigg 'After Noon Distance' and Cath Campbell 'Everything we do corrects the space' end on 20th December 2014

Richard Rigg

After Noon Distance

1 Nov - 20 Dec 2014

Workplace Gateshead

Richard Rigg

After Noon Distance, 2013

Subway light, Wire, Steel, Plastic, Rubber, Battery

Dimensions Variable

Unique

Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK

Private view: http://privateview.net/1/1fcc18f4d367cd52a0d5e9

Workplace Gallery is delighted to present After Noon Distance our second solo exhibition of new work by Richard Rigg. In the darkened ground floor gallery of Workplace Gateshead is a light with fixtures and fittings from a pedestrian underpass; the wiring at one end visibly cut. Maintaining its vertical and horizontal position despite being removed from its architecture, the linear structure of After Noon Distance implies the absent architectural context of the subway; as well as our ambiguous associations with such subterranian spaces. Despite its severed wiring the light remains impossibly on, creating a paradoxical and uncanny situation.

Richard Rigg's sculptures reproduce and manipulate everyday objects, transforming them into reflexive propositions and theoretical paradoxes. Employing culturally resonant objects that signify the foundations of our civilization through drawing upon the histories of science, mathematics and literature, Rigg pitches reason against itself, elegantly and iconoclastically undermining our own rational basis, yet suggesting an ulterior route. Rigg's reductive, minimal works open up potential meanings and ontological possibilities. Attempts to pin the works down into an exact reading are thwarted through their eliptical nature. In his work there is often a direct meeting of its beginning with its end.

Richard Rigg was born in Penrith, Cumbria in 1980 and graduated from Newcastle University in 2005. Recent exhibitions include Satellite Satellite Workplace London, Chance Finds Us MIMA, Middlesbrough, The Difference Loom Iziko South Africa National Gallery, be like water Workplace Gallery, Gateshead, Lacuna Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (solo), The Inhabitant of the Watchtower High Desert Test Sites, Joshua Tree, California, USA (solo), Cage Mix: Sculpture & Sound Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, The Glass Delusion The National Glass Centre, Sunderland, Suns Neither Rise Nor Set Royal College of Art, London. Rigg lives and works in Newcastle.

Cath Campbell

Everything we do corrects the space

1st November - 20th December 2014

Workplace Gateshead

Cath Campbell

for quartets, 2014
HD video (16:9)
2:56 Minutes (looped)
Edition of 3 plus 1 AP

Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK

Click here to view movie online

Cath Campbell

for the yellow smoke, 2014
HD video (16:9)
03:10 Minutes (looped)
Edition of 3 plus 1 AP

Courtesy of the artist and Workplace Gallery, UK

Click here to view movie online

Private view: http://privateview.net/1/c7eab2775e78e9f178f020

Workplace Gallery is delighted to present Everything we do corrects the space our second solo exhibition of new work by Cath Campbell. Two short video works - for quartets and for the yellow smoke continue an on going process of appropriating, manipulating and deconstructing found images and documentary travel photography collected from publications and the internet. The videos are made up of collected footage from travel diaries and documentaries found on YouTube depicting different American States - Alaska and California. Each video is structured as a series of short acts, parts or chapters, and the content of each is determined by the narrative contained in the subtitles. In each found movie clip, the original dialogue is translated through Google's automatic captions, leading to a series of slight mistranslations that lends a poetic subtext to the work. The disparate film clips are then carefully stitched together to create a dreamlike narrative that refers to the literary device of the 'inner monologue' or 'stream of consciousness' in which the writer attempts to remove rational thought, instead presenting the inner consciousness of the character. Each title is taken from a poem by T S Elliot, who uses this device in his work.

In making each work Campbell films the original video on her phone, direct from the computer screen, allowing the process to slightly distort the image and bleach the colour, and deliberately revealing the scratches and marks on the screen. These filmed clips are then edited and stitched together on her phone and uploaded back to Youtube, where the final subtitles are them added, and the work is re-filmed in HD to create the final work. This deliberately lo-fi mode of working intentionally reveals the layers of translation from the source material to final work, making apparent the fiction of the resulting film, and the contrasting experience of the artist and (documentary maker), in an attempt to explore relationship between reality, desire and experience.

Cath Campbell was born in Ilkeston, Derbyshire in 1972 and graduated from Newcastle university in 1995. Recent exhibitions include Satellite Satellite, Workplace London, Mostyn Open 18, Oriel Mostyn, Wales, An arrangement in white, XO, Leeds, UK, Ideal Mexico, Workplace Gallery, Gateshead, Enter slowly, The Lab, San Fransisco, USA, Natural Language [nach-er-uhl lang-gwij], Vitrine Gallery, London UK. Recent commissions include Untitled (Trellis), Trinity Hall College, Cambridge, UK, '21 arches instead of a gate', London, UK and 'marathon', Washington DC, USA.

Campbell lives and works in Newcastle, UK.

Workplace Gallery
The Old Post Office

19 - 21 West Street

Gateshead, NE8 1AD

tel: + 44 (0)191 4772200

(open Tues - Saturday 11am - 5pm, and by appointment)

Workplace London
61 Conduit Street

Mayfair
London, W1S 2GB

tel: +44 (0)207 434 1985

(open Friday - Saturday 10 am - 6pm, and by appointment)

web: http://www.workplacegallery.co.uk/

twitter: @_workplace_