The Wasteland

About

cueB gallery is proud to present a group show by 

Harriet Jones, Becky Sloss, Bethany Costerd, 
Stuart Southwell, Anna FC Smith, Ciara Callaghan, 
David McLean.

The Wasteland encourages the audience to look twice at the works on 
display and find the beauty and detail in what may have initially seemed 
aesthetically unpleasing or unworthy of investigation. The detail and energies in the works presented are at once ugly and beautiful, simple and intricate. 
The audience is encouraged to time to reexamine and question what is at first perceived. We hope that after reflection the viewer will find wonder and depth in the unattractive aspects of the world around them.

Harriet Jones
Harriet is a documentary photographer and filmmaker based in North-East London.Through her practice she enjoys capturing the details of the everyday and exploring creative storytelling techniques to offer new perspectives.
The photograph she is exhibiting was taken at Bow Creek, an area known as the 'Mouth of the River Lea', where the river Lea meets the Thames.
 
Becky Sloss
Becky Sloss is a multi-disciplinary artist specialising in other-worldy landscapes and creative taxidermy. She is heavily influenced by museum presentation and curiosity cabinets. The pieces exhibited are documentation of a 
fictitious journey through a crystalline world. The work both accentuates and distorts nature, hinting at the phantasmagorical. The observer is left to decide whether the work is art or artifact.
Becky is a BA Hons Fine Art graduate from Norwich University of the Arts, and is currently living and working in Nottingham.

Bethany Costerd
Bethany's work focuses on the need to tame unbound sensuality; to flatten, to glaze, to preserve a perfect image, is in tension with this bodily form. 
What happens when we look too close?  We may find repulsion in materiality. 
The predominance of the visual puts the body at risk of losing its sensuality; the blurriness of fantasy. It is the experience of both attraction and repulsion that fuels this work.

Bethany works with imagery; the infinite, disposable and desirable. She is interested how we process these images; how they affect memory and disrupt our physical reality. When working with an image, she feels compelled to intervene and make it physical; accentuate. Objects, forms and fragments that she is attracted to also go through a process of intervention, often compressed, or subdued in some way; she is very interested in locating why this is desirable.
The word ‘glaze’ is important in her work, with its connotations of food and manufactured objects, together with its relationship with vision. 
She is interested in both the passivity of what happens when eyes ‘glaze over’, and being overwhelmed by the infinite.
 
Stuart Southwell
Stuart Southwell is a visual artist living and working in Manchester. His work presents ideas of the grotesque which challenge western standards of beauty, identity and representation. 
 
Anna FC Smith
As a practitioner Smith sits between artist, historian and cultural commentator, with historical and anthropological research forming the basis of much of her work. Her main lines of study are uncovering or pinpointing tradition, rites, 
rituals, folk customs, gang cultures, protest movements and social obsessions in historical and contemporary cultures.  Specific subjects dictate the manner of research and the media she uses to translate and transmit the echoes of history and relate them to the now.
 
'The Drinkers' is a series of observed embroideries based on images taken from Facebook pages of clubs and pubs in Wigan. The works elevate these contemporary characters or Hogarthian style grotesques by rendering them through embroidery. A folk technique more typically reserved for beautifying items with flowers or other charming images.
 
Ciara Callaghan
Ciara Callaghan is a visual artist currently living on the island of St Agnes in the Isles of Scilly. Her work is inspired by her direct surroundings, the swift and continual birth and death in nature and the curiosities of land and sea.
 
David McLean
David McLean is a prolific Manchester based musician. Alongside a slew of solo projects ranging from microtonal sound works to shuddering industrial techno, David performs in critically acclaimed bands as disparate as Gnod, Naked (On Drugs) and Charles Hayward’s Anonymous Bash which has seen him tour the UK and Europe for several years.

At the very core of McLean’s practice is collaboration and as an active member of Manchester vibrant and diverse improvisational music scene he has recorded and performed with dozens of musicians in a variety of groupings and settings in the past three years. He also runs a boutique cassette label called Tombed Visions, releasing music by the likes of Ex-Easter Island Head, I Have Eaten The City and Circuit Breaker and was recently voted Tape Label of the Year by The Quietus and Label Discovery of the Year by OMGVinyl for 2014

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For more information, please contact: Franco La Russa at info@cuebgallery.com