I was listening, very carefully, to the voice at the end of a phone line. ‘We’re currently experiencing high customer demand’, it told me, ‘And there may be a delay in answering your call…’
Oh well, I thought. I’ll just put the old receiver back where I found it, lying on the wooden floor, twittering out its bland and familiar message underneath what seemed like a perfectly realised representation of respectability – a circular, varnished table, topped with a vase of plastic flowers and a small, framed piece of tapestry.
This is how I experienced the pent-up, buttoned-down frustration of ‘Please Hold’ (2025) by Kelan Andrews, one of his pieces included in Dis/Connect, a show of new art by three young graduates of Manchester Metropolitan University School of Art’s MA in Fine Art, curated by Air Gallery. All three explore, in unusual ways, the many and various feelings of discomfort, alienation and distancing that arise from a fast-changing, techno-driven, increasingly impersonal world.
Positioned on the third floor of an enormous, repurposed mill building, one of many on the southwest side of Oldham, 1853 Studios brings together a well-lit exhibition space with studios for artists to hire, plus a panoramic view of Manchester skyscrapers in the distance. Like many visitors, I travelled from high-rise Manchester to mill-filled Oldham by Metrolink. Another work by Andrews, ‘Tickets and Passes Please’ (2025), not only quotes the orders barked out every day to tram and train customers by company inspectors, but creates laughter in its very nature: a repainted toy tram system complete with track, station and miniature passengers awaiting a journey they will never be able to take, because despite the fact that the carriages have wheels, their bodywork is made of solid wood and there will never be any room inside.
Another of Andrews’ creations, ‘Planned Obsolescence’ (2025), presents the visitor with a seated humanoid figure that has seemingly evolved from a mass of glossy, black swirls, which were, from a distance, reminiscent of a seventeenth century man’s wig. On closer examination, the swirls proved to be many untold metres of unspooled video cassette tape, shaped and posed to resemble Rodin’s much-reproduced sculpture of 1880, ‘The Thinker’, its head now a video cassette with the sprockets standing in for eyes. It sits, appropriately, on a cardboard box labelled Restore Records Management. As someone who grew up accumulating a large archive of tapes and videos, I am only too familiar with the feeling that my collecting habit was getting out of control and my collection was taking on a life of its own – thoughts that this puzzled-looking, puzzling creature further bring to mind.
On looking up, I could not help noticing what seemed at first like a human being wearing an orange sweater, jeans and white and red trainers, lying down flat, hands in pockets, on a couple of white cushions. It was a fourth work by Andrews, ‘Thriller’ (2023). Could the relaxed, floor-based individual actually be a performance piece by the artist himself? No. The figure’s disturbingly long neck, displaying a distinctive mole, was glorified not by a recognisable human head but by something shocking and unlikely, though quite familiar to millions who remember using one: a Panasonic portable cassette tape player. Looking closer, it was apparent that the reclining figure had pressed Play. The spindles revolved, and the cassette inside was clearly labelled with the title of the legendary recording after which the installation is named. Michael Jackson’s LP ‘Thriller’ was originally released in 1982 and grossed the biggest album sales figure ever – 70 million copies. But the sound that I heard from the cassette player’s speakers caused significant confusion, because the audio consisted of unfamiliar electronic beats and blaring sonic explosions. The result was interesting to think about. Ostensibly, the artist is fooling viewers or listeners with a fake tape. But the work goes beyond that by inventing a strange new character, which plays its own audio but also embodies the machine that is doing the playing. It plays tricks with our ears and eyes, and also our heads. But as this life-size sculpture also suggests, artistic involvement, qualified by human alienation, is clearly involved in the dialectic the piece articulates.
In the middle of the space, suspended by thick rope and slowly revolving like a human body, dead by hanging, is an egg-shaped sculpture: ‘War’ (2024) by Nicky Nadine. Like a horrifying Easter egg, it is decorated with paintings and drawings of terrible domestic scenes from Ukraine, including people camping out in a burning subway station, blocks of flats engulfed in flames, and one of a mother tending a child-like body, captioned ‘How was I to know I would never see you again?’ – which is, according to the artist, her message to a deceased great uncle. Other paintings by the same artist explore painful personal experiences of mental health conditions, including ‘cPTSD’ (2025), visualising in pastel a young girl being pinned down by a giant eagle with one claw over her hyper-alert and determined face, its beak pecking out the unfortunate victim’s innards. A female Prometheus for the present day, perhaps, with a possible reference to the trauma inflicted by war. Another sculpture, ‘Doubt’ (2025), made of newspaper, clay, bronze and some of the artist’s own hair, fantasises a giant spider with multiple eyes and a cartoon-like, fanged face, its body appearing to rise up from a wooden chair which has a heavily-soiled tea towel draped over it. Notes from exhibition publicity material pointed towards the spider representing the artist’s own anxiety – especially in the way the Manga-influenced arachnid seems determined to creepy-crawl around, looking for a bite of something a bit more satisfying than lunch. It is the most dramatic piece of work in the show, but its fun-filled fizzog made me realise it is the viewer as well as the artist who might one day end up this creature’s victim.
However, as several of the other works in this exhibition prove, feelings of disconnection, doubt and grief may, occasionally, also open bridges to new realms of experience, at least for some of us. Renee Nie’s work, for instance, explores bodily change, in particular in circumstances caused by medical intervention and diagnosis – inner worlds invoked in installations like ‘My Field’ (2023), which combines stainless steel surgical instruments and other types of medical equipment made of plastic or rubber with the Australian flowering plant sphenotoma squarrosa, all apparently growing out of a pile of mulch, in an anthropogenic update of Durer’s hyper-real painting ‘A Great Piece of Turf’ (1503). Another work in metal, ‘Created Time-2’ (2020), comments on online messaging platforms, reducing communication to a long series of numbers stamped, line after line, into a sheet of aluminium – a reminder of the flat, polished and superficial nature of much contemporary human contact. More interestingly, Nie has looked for new ways of describing the effects of medical intervention, which can be understood as a form of bodily invasion that can heal, destroy, change or deliver new life. Nie’s painting, ‘Stitching Lullaby’ (2023), for instance, creates a kind of visual poem out of the way images of a surgeon’s hands sewing up wounded flesh have been arranged by the artist in the square space. Looking at her large oil painting, ‘My Pearl Tower’ (2023), I could not decide if I was seeing a dramatic, new abstract work or an enlarged medical photograph that has been meticulously copied. Either way, looking at the work takes the viewer into a different and new space. Nie’s paintings also introduce unusual elements such as glass, in the form of a small, ear-shaped sculpture which provides the centrepiece to her diptych, ‘Cullen’s Journey’ (2023), bringing together sun-like discs representing the senses of sight on the left with taste and smell on the right. They all seem to exist in a grey universe, stimulating or responding to the flow of circulating vortexes indicated by arrow-like flames. The result verges on the mystical.
Thinking about Dis/Connect in retrospect, I was struck by the extent that pre-existing manufactured objects, such as those used by Kelan Andrews, can take on another life that comments on the present but points towards a different future, in parallel with the frightening, dystopian one evoked by the 1940s-style gasmasks the human race suddenly finds useful when blizzards of poisonous snow threaten the planet, as seen in the recent Netflix series, The Eternaut, and the more remote and lonely future awaiting what will be played out of the reel-to-reel tape recorder used in Samuel Beckett’s 1958 play, Krapp’s Last Tape, a notable production of which has starred Gary Oldman this Spring at York’s Theatre Royal. These are times, as Nicky Nadine expresses powerfully, of potential pessimism and disillusion, with a need for some kind of reviving energy, or a chance, at least, to laugh. There may be some hope among the inner worlds of human anatomy, of physical pain and relief from it, that are captured in some of Renee Nie’s work. But much of what frightens us, with good reason, is the result of the deliberate acceleration of capitalism. And even a wooden Metrolink system will not slow that down in a hurry.
Dis/Connect: Kelan Andrews, Nicky Nadine and Renee Nie, Air Gallery at 1853 Studios, Osborne Street, Oldham, 17 – 31 May 2025.
Bob Dickinson is a freelance writer and critic based in Manchester.
This review is an independent commission from Corridor8.
Published 28.05.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
1,622 words
