Beagles & Ramsay
dal 11/6/2004 al 25/7/2004
Segnalato da
11/6/2004
Beagles & Ramsay
Chapter Gallery, Cardiff
New meat. Early works by Beagles & Ramsay featured the notorious Scottish diet, food scares including e-coli and BSE, child criminality and neighbours from hell. More recently, their interest is in narratives that describe broader but equally anxious phenomena: political disenfranchisement, the culture of consumerism, and the cult of celebrity. Across their body of work, a satirical recitation of urban myths and media scares rubs alongside deeper fears and genuine threats.
NEW MEAT
12 June  25 July 2004
Early works by Beagles & Ramsay featured the notorious Scottish diet, food scares including e-coli and BSE, child criminality and neighbours from hell. More recently, their interest is in narratives that describe broader but equally anxious phenomena: political disenfranchisement, the culture of consumerism, and the cult of celebrity. Across their body of work, a satirical recitation of urban myths and media scares rubs alongside deeper fears and genuine threats.
Beagles and Ramsay have worked in A4 poster format, installation, photography, video, music, critical writing and short stories, and 'New Meat¹ features a series of specially commissioned works that develop their longstanding preoccupation with self-portraiture. The duo have created a further series of doppelgangers possessed with a horrific beauty and mordant humour.
Phase IV presents the artists as a chimeric mass of indistinguishable, fragmented body parts. A beguiling slice of Grand Guignol, this grotesque tableau reduces the artists to tumescent lumps of meticulously rendered rotting flesh and coagulated blood.
In an accompanying installation a pair of motorised, rotating glitter ball skulls offers a mesmeric vision more seductive than visceral. A third self portrait pairing, Dumbstruck, features twinned ventriloquist dummy self-portraits shown with large-format gilt framed photographs and new video performance works made for Chapter.
Beagles and Ramsay have worked collaboratively since 1997. Recent solo exhibitions include Gasworks Gallery London, YYZ Toronto and Floating IP Manchester. Group exhibitions include 'Zenomap' at the Venice Biennale 2003, 'Videodrome' at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and 'Dub'l Introoder' at Transmission, Glasgow. In October they will show new work at the PS1 MOMA Contemporary Art Centre, New York.
'New Meat¹ features new work commissioned by Chapter and is supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
For more information, press prints or to arrange and interview with the artists please contact Hannah Firth on 029 2031 1055
Chapter
Market Road, CF5 1QE Cardiff
tel 029 20 304400
fax 029 20 313434