Detail of a graffiti-style collage work of art

Some Assembly Required

Archie Ogus, detail from 'Untitled', 2024. Image courtesy of Slugtown.

Some Assembly Required at Slugtown was an interim show organised by first year MFA students from Newcastle University. The cohort of six assembled themselves using their differences as a starting point, which is wittily articulated in their co-authored ‘statement’ —an exquisite corpse, or game of consequences for those of you not acquainted with the Surrealist term. This ‘statement’ is a creature made up of six mismatched parts, all drawn by a different hand in a different style, ignorant of what came before or what will come after. A promising cipher for this exciting time in the students’ art-career-life. Their names are listed in this order: Archie Ogus, Ardra Nair, Brandon Pearce, Frank Pretorius, Elizabeth Oughton, Kitty McKay – and I assume this is a key to their contributions to the assembled image.

Slugtown is a small space, and that creates an effective parameter for an MFA group show curated around difference. A boundary to butt up against or give in to. Constrictions encouraged them to contribute smaller or fewer works than they might have wanted. And now the audience is going to come in and look real close. One of the group said it made it harder, but I imagine it also took some of the tyranny of choice away. There’s nowhere to hide on this intimate scale.

A gallery space with paintings on two walls and a construction made from yellow bus railings supporting a tv in the middle of the floor. A little behind this is a hay-bale-sized object wrapped in black plastic.
Installation view of Some Assembly Required, at Slugtown, Newcastle, 2024. Image courtesy of Slugtown.

I met the group as they finished installing. It felt awkward at first, me looking at the work, rubbing my chin – just ignore me, I called…but who were we kidding? I’m looking at Kitty McKay’s untitled installation, an arrangement of yellow hand rails and seat, sourced from a real ‘bus dealer’, which has a TV monitor attached. I’m watching the film but also taking everything else in, and it’s like being on the Metro, Tyne and Wear’s light railway system – I almost reach out and grab the rail. I’m not good at standing for long so I crouch down into a creaky sitting position and Ardra asks me if I want a chair. I decline but it is good to be asked. To my right is Archie Ogus’s large collage of magazine and newspaper painted over with graffiti style shapes, like worms. The pages from the paper are not the free paper you find all over the seats of public transport, also named the Metro, but the Guardian. Seen through the gaps in McKay’s public transport mock-up, it enhances the effect of being in a public palimpsest. There is another, smaller piece by Ogus behind me. The work is graceful, almost elegant, but maybe too tasteful, an example of graffiti transforming into abstraction.

A green-hued painting of a shamanistic hyena-dog-woman.
Frank Pretorius, ‘Untitled’, 2024. Image courtesy of Slugtown.

McKay’s work is a more carnivalesque reflection on public spaces, using actual material of public transport (the seats), a metaphor for porous surfaces that are always, in some way, under construction. This is shared by the other works through the simplicity of their arrangement, each artist having contributed only one or two pieces, spreading them out into a porous construct. McKay’s film shows an extreme close up of the bus seat, its fuzzy texture and bright blues and yellow-orange blown up to show it on a molecular level. Am I looking at bacteria? Hairs of yellow and blue, complementary colours that can’t help but be aesthetic. I’m on a Metro crawling with bugs that look like they’re fighting or mating. This is a gross sharing of microscopia. My eye drifts across to Frank Pretorius’s green-hued painting of a shamanistic hyena-dog-woman and then back to the bugs fighting and I get a delicious feeling of the horror of the everyday. It is like a Devo video crossed with a Stephen King book cover: existential and camp. The imagery in Pretorius’s painting is a tad unsettling. I understand there is an eerie feeling he is aiming for, one that as a player of horror games I appreciate. I do wonder though how much thought has gone into examining the male gaze for this work; it’s a bit hard to tell.

There are other, intensely graphic pieces in the show. As well as Pretorius’s horror-inflected (untitled) oil painting there are three smaller, tighter paintings of cyborg hands with snake, a mecha-skeleton with red cardinal, and a patchwork of coloured squares by Ardra Nair, a series titled ‘Glitch in the Transmutation’ (2024). These are hung at different heights, including flat on the floor, adding to the uncanny-urban atmosphere. She has been thinking about glitches, in technology, while working in oil paint. But perhaps not about the glitches in the technology of oil paint – i.e. there’s no messing it up. Nair’s paintings are impressive in their detail and precision and the way some of the imagery appears to be pixelated suggests they are representations of some very neat and orderly glitches. An irony perhaps? Nair has a luscious, graphic style that is so clean you bounce right off. A glitch frustrates, perhaps these need to be more frustrating, more antagonistic. Maybe she could arrange for someone to knock her elbow while she’s painting.

A hay-bale-sized object wrapped in black plastic, a red-purple net draped over one corner, the phrase 'Growing to love this stranger' printed in white on one side.
Brandon Pearce, ‘DADDY ISSUES #1’, 2024. Image courtesy of Slugtown.

There is a sculpture on the floor, in the middle of the space, a hay bale wrapped in black plastic, like a package left outside a shop. There are words printed on – Growing to love this stranger – and some woven hand-dyed cordage in shades of purple – a hay net for feeding horses I later discover. This is ‘DADDY ISSUES #1’ (2024) by Brandon Pearce. #2 of the series is on the wall below Pretorius’s painting, the same words as #1 printed white on black stretch wrap. There is a melancholy to this assemblage. Like McKay’s bus furniture it is a striking patch of the material ‘real’ amongst the fantastical imagery. There is an amazing tension here between the physical and the emotional which creates a kind of third space where the real and imagined overlap.

The students are chatting about another show, an MA in curating, and what’s everyone doing at the weekend? It’s that waiting time between finishing the install and the preview. I imagine they could all do with a drink. There is a disparate camaraderie between them. Once people start arriving the tension will ease but I put my notepad down and sit with them for a chat.

A painting of cyborg hands intertwined with a snake.
Ardra Nair, from the series ‘Glitch in the Transmutation’, 2024. Image courtesy of Slugtown.

I occasionally work at Northumbria University so we had a conversation about the relationship between our two institutions, which on the surface is fairly lacking. It falls short somehow and no one knows whose responsibility that is. Well, I guess to some extent it’s ours, we conclude. Right here in this room it feels like the first meeting of an undercommons. We have been given this time together, courtesy of Newcastle University, but we can use it however we choose. We can have an impromptu crit, a discussion or a seminar or just hang out together, like this.

Slugtown is a lovely space. It is cool and neat and cubelike and has a concrete floor and just enough rough edges to accommodate a stylized attempt at the experimental, which I think is what is happening here. The window is its boon. You look out and see the brick and concrete structures of Shieldfield, the materia of the urban environment and people walking past. A kid in his school uniform is bouncing on a pogo stick. We cheer him on. The kids of Shieldfield are a regular fixture at openings around here now, ever since the NewBridge Project, round the corner, made an actual and effective effort to engage them. Slugtown followed suit, welcoming young people into the space. They will be here tonight at the opening, drinking orange squash and pointing scarily close to the paintings with genuine enthusiasm.

A layered print on handmade paper is shown on a bare plaster wall.
Elizabeth Oughton, ‘Exploring Stone’, 2024. Image courtesy of Slugtown.

As I scan the room, the works become a series of parts. And in this sense the space allows, enforces or guarantees a generosity. There are ways in which the works point towards a layering, obviously where ideas overlap but visually too in individual pieces. I’m thinking here of Elizabeth Oughton’s beautiful etchings ‘Exploring Stone 1 and 3’ (2024). Her layering up of processes and techniques she calls ‘studies in stone’ and when I hear this I first think, no, they’re studies in printmaking. But does stone not form like this, in strata, over time as a process? It just doesn’t have the neat edges of a tidy etching. These prints prompt me to wonder what a deeper study of stone would look like? What do embedded stories and deep listening look like in the form of ink pressed into paper?

I ask about the curatorial decisions they made and discover that this show is part of a curating module on the course. It was ‘deeply collaborative’, someone says, but I don’t buy it. Collaborative claims can be made that are perhaps more wishful thinking than reality. It’s okay to be lightly collaborative, to be together and we have to make this work. There was consensus in the process, they tell me, but I sense a holding back. Maybe it was a deeply collaborative experience for one or two of the group and the others were happy to go along, which is A-OK. Collaboration may not have been what everyone signed up for. The fact that they chose to play with it, heralded by their joint statement, is suggestive of something potentially more nuanced. And this notion of forced togetherness, unknowing and playful estrangement could be used in their next iteration quite nicely.

A folded piece of pink paper displaying an 'exquisite corpse' - a composite humanoid figure drawn by six different hands.
‘Exquisite Corpse’ handout, 2024. Image courtesy of Lesley Guy.

They say they wanted to unravel the process, decisions were made, things were changed, there was a dialogue, but this is not particularly evident in the show. It looks fixed, set in place and the process hidden – except for the statement, the exquisite corpse. That folded handout is a beautiful thing. The most coherently collective, and properly experimental thing there. It is clunky, like the title of the show, and I love that. It doesn’t look like they brought their work into Slugtown blindfolded, which I guess would be taking it to its (absurd) logical conclusion, but this game could have pushed them harder or further in the way they curated themselves in this space.

The group will show work alongside the second year MFAs across the Hatton Gallery and the Fine Art Department at Newcastle University in August (opening Friday 16th August). I’m excited to see where the work goes next and whether they might dabble in something a bit more risky, a bit more monstrous!

The group asked me to give a shout out to Lucian Anderson for his technical support.

Lesley Guy is a writer and artist based in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Some Assembly Required at Slugtown ran from 26 April – 4 May 2024.

This review is supported by Newcastle University.

Published 06.06.2024 by Benjamin Barra in Reviews

1,850 words