NOW ANOTHER PROCEDURE IS TO RUN
Allan Hughes, Mark Jackson, Gail Pickering, Jawbone Jawbone

8 February – 15 March 2018

‘NOW ANOTHER PROCEDURE IS TO RUN’ brings together works employing historical analogue videotape, live transmission and televisual images to explore and critique on the collective actions and self-indulgent desires of contemporary society. The installation will present itself as series of live broadcasts, with live/lived experiences, non-fictional and fictional storytelling that are intertwined within its surface materiality as much as its content which constructs new narrative spaces and platforms. These systems contain political and aesthetic implications that address the subjectivity of popular visual formats and enable reflection of our contemporary relationship with images. The works of these artists probe the overlap, slippage and disconnect between reality and representation.

Allan Hughes (1974-) and Mark Jackson (1976-) are The Blue Mountain, a dreamwork based in the Tyneside conurbation. They recycle souls using triangles inscribed on their arms as a tripartite that leads to creative action. As Senior Lecturers in Fine Art and Visual & Material Cultures at Northumbria University they climb up gleaming edifices: Marl Jackson and Alllan Hughes, paranormal investigators from the 1980s cast in an Anthony Gormley studio. They have wings instead of arms like the Angel of the North but their bodies are small, like miniatures, and they have phocomelia: errors, typos, missing bits, umbilical hernias and projecting brains, because the metal doesn’t flow back on itself when cast with a centrifuge. Recent visitations have included Blue Mountain Equals Arcturus at The Northern Charter in Newcastle upon Tyne, Blue Mountain at Manchester Contemporary, My Part of Your Home, (curated by Giles Bailey & CIRCA Projects) at Shipley Gallery Gateshead and a material production collaboration with Plastique Fantastique for Shonky a Hayward Touring Show. They will launch their Blue Mountain Starter Set, a set of 28mm white metal miniatures at IMT Gallery, London in April 2018.

Gail Pickering works with moving image, performance and installation.  A key aspect is her use of historical material as staged through voice, mimicry and through the various accomplices and protagonists with whom she has collaborated in her videos and performances. The tension between the moving image and live presence offers an instability that recurs throughout her work in a desire to position it and us within a temporal and spatial present.  In each exhibition of “Near Real Time” Pickering adds and subtracts material and varies the choreography of its installation, at its core performative. Pickering graduated with an MFA from Goldsmiths in 2001. Her work has been exhibited widely, including Tate Modern; ICA, London; South London Gallery; Centre of Contemporary Art, Vilnius; Magasin Centre for Contemporary Art, Grenoble, France; Kunstverien Stuttgart, Germany; Gasworks and the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Pickering recently had two major solo exhibitions at La Ferme Du Buission, Paris, 2014 and the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2014-15 and was nominated for the Jarman Award in 2015.

Nikki Katrina Carroll (b. 1994, Grantham) and Matthew Young (b. 1993 Stockton-on-Tees) are based in Graduate Studios Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne.  Artistically they collaborate through their third identity, Jawbone Jawbone.  As habitual re-users of imagery they aim to generate visual motifs that appear in various mediums and forms. Expanding from a simplistic image or conventional belief, they channel a daydream-like aesthetic to influence their decision making.  Through this approach their multidisciplinary works become elements attempting to understand 3D life; whilst playfully reflecting on common sense. Recent shows include I Can’t Remember the Last Time I Used Cardamom, TESTT Gallery, Durham; Les Boîtes Suede Gallery w/ Slugtown, Edinburgh; Dishwasher Safe System Gallery, Newcastle; Bish Bash Bosh by We The North, The Royal Standard, Liverpool and Deep Down the Ear Canal, Slugtown, Newcastle.

This project is kindly supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.