Two Person Show: David Gledhill and Corin Sworn

Castlefield Gallery is pleased to present a two-person show with David Gledhill and Corin Sworn that consists of new and existing work. Through painting and old media the artists extrapolate and represent personal artefacts such as photo albums, slides and diaries found at flea markets and skips. The discarded vernacular imagery – divorced from author, epoch and context – challenges our understanding of the spatial and the temporal, re-imagining and re-categorising them to enact as new instances in time and association.

Sworn’s Endless Renovation consists of a series of projected, discarded slides salvaged from a skip accompanied by a narrative spoken by the artist. The piece suggests that the images have been taken by a clock maker whose products represent an unusual relationship to time; one that loops and folds, rather than through a specific progression. Respectively, the audio text moves between theoretical discussion of the images and a collection of meandering thoughts, quoted essays and poems. A relationship gradually develops between the artist and clock maker, constructed through a meta-narrative that is at times self reflexive, seemingly probable but the degree to which it may move beyond supposition is never clear.

Gledhill’s Doctor Munscheid series of paintings are transcriptions of photographs from a family photo album discovered in Frankfurt at a flea market. The photographs, that span a nine year period in 1950s East Germany, feature scenes from the Munscheid family home and social gatherings with family and friends. The images, some of which are un-composed and include optical aberrations, add a degree of intimacy and mawkish sentimentality presenting a complex relationship between the personal and the political backdrop of the Cold War.

The artists enable us to construct our own narratives subverting the notion of authorship and acknowledging the power of images dislocated from their context. Brought from the sphere of personal memory into the public they attribute the collection of found images, previously undervalued, with a new currency and discipline, their meaning radically changed.

n.b. Sworn’s work takes part of its structure from L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, an avant garde group of poets that emerged in the 1970s associated with leftist politics. The poets attempted to create an emphasis on the language of the poem and create a new way for the reader to interact with the work. The poems were often broken into disjointed phrases and the phrases broken into words attempting to purify the language from ‘corruption’ and ‘banality’. The movement was closely associated to the Black Mountain and New York Schools.

More on the artists:

David Gledhill (based in Manchester) attempts to articulate the tradition of painting with that of photography, film and television to expose the mechanisms that condition the social production of meaning. He has had solo shows at Philips Gallery, Manchester; Rochdale Art Gallery; Fsquared Building, Manchester; Huyton Gallery, Merseyside and Comme Ca Art Gallery, Manchester. His work has been in group exhibitions at Transition Gallery, London; CUBE, Manchester; Farmiloe Building, London; Imitate Gallery, Manchester; Apartment Gallery, Manchester; Storey Institute Gallery, Lancaster and axellappprojects, Berlin.

Corin Sworn (based in Vancouver and Glasgow) explores issues connected with the process by which subjective experience becomes translated into history. She works with drawing video and sculpture. She has had solo shows at Tramway, Glasgow; Washington Garcia, Glasgow; ZieherSmith, New York, U.S.A; Blanket Gallery, Or Gallery and Access, Vancouver, Canada. Selected group exhibitions include ICA, London; Norwich University College of the Arts; Daniel Arnaud Gallery, London; Gasworks, London; VTO Gallery, London; Rotterdam Film Festival, The Netherlands; Witte De With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Museu da Cidade, Lisbon; Contemporary Art Gallery, Bogotá; Kunsthalle, Basel, Switzerland and Migrating Forms Film Festival, New York. Sworn is represented by ZieherSmith, New York and Blanket Gallery, Vancouver, Canada. Sworn studied psychology and art history at the University of British Columbia, obtained BFA from the Emily Carr Institute of the Arts and an MFA from the Glasgow School of Art.

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For press enquiries please contact: Jennifer Dean, Communications Coordinator jennifer@castlefieldgallery.co.uk. Castlefield Gallery, 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester, M15 4GB. T: +44 (0) 161 832 8034.