Abstract

UK artists Alec Shepley and John McClenaghen were invited to show as part of the gallery’s curatorial policy to host exhibitions by established artists who are committed to an engagement with the wider cultural and academic community. The installation comprising assemblages and collages, photographs and drawings, forms a part of a much broader research project in which the two artists are investigating the presentation of the fragmented work and the ‘unfinished’ project. Aspects of dilapidation, ruin and entropy are explored and much of the work in this exhibition focuses on more positive interpretations of ruin – on a thing that might be coming into being as opposed to being left to decay. The work resulting from the research project is demonstrating a seemingly endless preoccupation with cutting, placing, re-cutting and re-placing, joining and unjoining, in the collages/assemblages (telescoping between making and un-making) and the eventual ‘dis-assembly’ or collapse of the outcome. The paradoxical issue of trying to ‘frame’ something that is meant to remain un-framed is at the heart of the project and questions whether the work itself is in a state of ruin – failing in a way to remain intact and opening up potential spaces for renewed practice – but always coming into being.