About
Glasgow-based artist Mark Neville makes lens-based works which have been realised and disseminated in a large array of contexts, as both still and moving image pieces. The centre of Neville's investigation is how different types of film and photographic practice align themselves with different demographic groups, how images generally are disseminated according to class and income and how documentary practice can be subverted in order to empower its sitter or subject matter beyond the position of its author. Points of reference for Neville's work might include the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, or the works of Martha Rosler, John Berger, Robert Heinecken or Hans Haacke.
Neville has consistently undertaken large-scale, ambitious photographic projects, often involving entire communities, local councils and the press and media, most notably in The Port Glasgow Book Project and Fancy Pictures. In The Port Glasgow Book Project, he made a coffee table book of his own social documentary images of the town, delivered exclusively to each of the eight thousand houses in the Port by the local boys football team. The book is not available anywhere else, commercially, by mail order, or otherwise. Neville's concept was to undermine the framework of exploitation inherent in the way these types of images are normally disseminated.
Neville's photographic works have featured recently in shows including The Gathering and Parrworld, and his 16mm film works have screened in exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Bern, La Casa Encendida Madrid, Tramway, Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute and at Tate Britain in the 2004 David Curtis curated show A Century of Artists' Film in Britain. The film Fancy Pictures is in the current UK touring Arts Council exhibition Now Showing 2.
The work exists in different forms in several important collections, including those of the Arts Council of England, Kunstmuseum Bern, National Galleries of Scotland and the Flemish Community.
Neville has presented talks on his practice internationally at venues which include Harvard University and Whitechapel Art Gallery and the work has been the subject of many reviews and articles in art journals including Frieze, Art Monthly, Source and Map. He is currently engaged in a major new museum commission for the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. Showing rarely seen films and documentary material, Neville will talk about his practice, with reference to the ethics of how images are framed and disseminated.
www.markneville.co.uk
