Nick Jordan
some work:
collaborative work:
e-mail:
nick@nickjordan.info
Rub-a-dub-dub
Jacob Cartwright, Nick Jordan and Stephen McNeilly
04/05/07 to 17/06/07
Projektraum exex, St. Gallen,
Switzerland
For installation views click here
Projektraum
exex presents individual and collaborative work from three UK-based artists:
Jacob Cartwright, Nick Jordan and Stephen McNeilly. The exhibition highlights
the different approaches, connections, discords and dialogues that operate
between each artist's practice, and illustrates an irreverent multiplicity
at the centre of their work.
Cuttlefish figure prominently in Jacob Cartwright's I Told You So,
part of three new paintings. One cuttlefish is squeezed purposefully by
a dark hand, another lies dissected and discarded. Armed with a quill
pen, another dark hand has drawn something in the middle of the painting,
a conflation of malformed mouse, ear and mushroom cloud.
In a new set of drawings,
Nick Jordan has singled-out three of Jacob Strutt's oaks, from his illustrated
book Sylva Britannica, or Portraits of Forest Trees (1830). The
twisted oaks have been modified with some exaggerated features, such as
stag-headed branches and elongated withered boughs. Into each drawing,
Jordan has added caricatures of himself, Cartwright and McNeilly; whimsically
re-presenting and personalizing each fictional, bespoke tree portrait.
Stephen McNeilly's
Butcher, Baker, Candlestickmaker are images of plasticine lumps, mauled
and squeezed into ridiculous anthropomorphisms. Before being digitally
animated, the plasticine becomes degraded in the quagmire of the artist's
office. Stored in a desk draw they co-exist with McNeilly's personal detritus;
acquiring material traces that are visible in his macro photographs and
crude, lo-fi animations.
Projektraum
exex will premiere a new collaborative film by Cartwright, Jordan and
McNeilly: Descriptions
and Sketches of Some Remarkable Oaks. The film depicts three
protagonists (the artists themselves) climbing, measuring, photographing
and documenting some aged or dead oak trees, dramatically revealed in
the birch-coppiced clearings of Sherwood Forest. The soundtrack comprises
of three mechanical/distorted voices, each with a different pitch, reading
William Cowper's epic unfinished poem Yardley
Oak, written in 1791. Cowper presents the twisted and ancient
oak as a totemic monument to a shared English identity, through which
the inevitability of time's dissolution and decay is brought home to roost.
The exhibition is titled after a traditional English nursery rhyme, which depicts the scurrilous behaviour of three audience members at a fair's bawdy side-show attraction:
Rub-a-dub-dub
Three men in a tub;
And who do you think they be?
The butcher, the baker,
The candlestick maker.
Turn 'em out Knaves, all three!
More on the artists:
Cartwright and Jordan regularly produce work together, with their on-going project, Würstundgritz, highlighting the contingencies and encounters of collaboration. Their book, Alien Invaders, was recently published (Book Works, 2006), and exhibitions together include Godwottery, Transition Gallery, London; The Goose Fair, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester; Künstlerhaus, Castle Plüschow, Germany. They are currently undertaking a fellowship at The Manchester Museum. The exhibition expands their collaborative practice with McNeilly, who currently works with plasticine, photography and animation. McNeilly recently exhibited at Vertigo Gallery, London and Redux, London; publications include In Search of the Absolute (2004); Between Method & Madness (2005); The Commonplace Book (Dedecus Press, 2007).
projektraum
exex. Oberer Graben 38, CH-9000 St.Gallen, Switzerland
e-mail: exex@visarteost.ch
Supported by
Jacob
Cartwright, Nick Jordan and Stephen McNeilly
'Wurstundgritzmitbrutti:
Taxidermy', 2007
