Launch Pad: Th-th-th-that’s all folks!

About

Artists: Jamie Fitzpatrick, Maria Gondek, Amy Kim Grogan, Alfie Kungu, Millie Layton, James Lomax, Milly Peck, and Dominic Watson.

Guest judge Poppy Bowers, Exhibitions Curator at the Whitworth (Manchester) and Castlefield Gallery’s Curator Matthew Pendergast selected Th-th-th-thats all folks!  from CG Associate members’ submissions.

Rhino is Emily Chapman, Liam Fallon, Tulani Hlalo (CG Associate member and Castlefield Gallery 2017-18 Manchester School of Art Graduate Mentee) and Meghan Smith.

Th-th-th-that’s all folks! features work by artists based across the UK, including Glasgow, Birmingham and London, a number of whom are exhibiting in Manchester for the first time. Working with video, sculpture and painting, the artists selected by Rhino share a particular sense of humour, part expression of and part refusal to be determined by the current socio-political climate, and accompanying the exhibition will be two texts- one by a 23-year-old and one written by a 6-year-old.

‘’Over the past year, there has come to light an array of similarities in the work of artists commenting on and documenting our disheartening socio-political situation. In Henri Lefebvre’s ‘The Production of Space’ he makes reference to Paul Klee and the Bauhaus; claiming that artists do not actually make work about space but instead, produce space. It is in this way that a new landscape is (re)emerging, as artists reclaim exhibition space as an intimate and safe domain for their own creative recreation. We have witnessed a breadth of work manipulating exhibition space, charged with an incentive ‘to loosen up a little’. Regardless of age or background, a flashback to our childhoods and its accompanying naivety is something that we have all experienced on varying levels. This project brings to life motifs and imagery stolen from the minds of our much younger selves, rejecting anyone and anything that attempts to interfere with it. Instead of being spectators of the spectacle, we want to be emerged in spectacle, to exist within the realms of an abstracted reality which defies and rejects the current socio-political situation we otherwise find ourselves within.’’

– Rhino, 2018

Launch Pads are short exhibitions or performances that punctuate Castlefield Gallery’s main curated programme providing artists, writers and independent curators with the opportunity to use the gallery as a test bed for the production, display and consumption of contemporary art. Launch Pads feature works and projects selected from CG Associate members’ proposals. For more information about CG Associates visit castlefieldgallery.co.uk/associates