Demos (2024)
Single channel film proposals for a project mapping Teesside’s independent music venues. In 1976, against a backdrop of industrial decline, The Rock Garden ‘a failing bierkeller on the edge of Middlesborough town centre‘ (Steve Harland, FMTTM ) began operating as a music venue. Performances by The Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Adverts, X Ray Spex , Joy Division and The Damned galvanised local people to start their own bands and publish their own zines. The Rock Garden closed in 1981.
Photos of Teesside band No Way and fans courtesy of Kath Callan, Paul Callan and Pete Collins. Demos was supported by Navigator North, and Teeside Archives.
Installation photography Rachel Deakin
forever and just for one day (2022)
An installation developed using imagery connected to David Bowie’s 1977 Top of the Pops performance of Heroes. Screen printed panels, ‘part wallpaper, part set design’ (Andrew Mummery) and a single framed print replicating the optical effects of a CRT screen, functioned as a backdrop to three improvised performances at 20 Albert Road in Glasgow’s Southside. An accompanying risograph publication, drew on archival BBC Scotland news footage covering Bowie’s 1978 concerts at Glasgow’s Apollo Theatre. The venue was under threat of closure amid controversial cuts to public arts funding.
Installation – Screen printing by M.A.R.S (Glasgow). Design consultant Ronan Devlin. Photography Patrick Jameson. Installation commissioned by AMG-5.
Performances – Jessica Argo and Fritz Welch DATE, EGO DEPLETION and Benicio del Trainwreck, DATE, Fritz Welch (solo durational performance) DATE. Performances commissioned by AMG-5. Photography Patrick Jameson.
Publication – Risograph, 12 pages, soft back, stapled, edition of 100. Designed by Alan Hathaway, riso printing by Tiny Golden Books. Published by AMG-5.
Exhibition dedicated to Thomas Jerome Newton
Blue Monday (2021)
A reimagining of the Top of the Pops set design which accompanied New Order’s 1983 performance of the song Blue Monday. Shown alongside previously unseen films by Gordon Matt-Clark, the work drew parallels between Matta-Clark’s use of New York’s abandoned piers for his ‘cut works’, the proliferation of club culture within the post industrial spaces of 1980’s Manchester and the temporal repurposing of dormant commercial space for Middlesbrough Art Week.
Exhibition photography by Kev Howard and Jason Hynes. Exhibition install documentation Joanne Coates.
AIR (ABODE) Residency (2021)
Residency Triggers: Hyperesthesia, Infrastructure, Art Ecologies, Architecture, Community, Brexit, Pandemic Recovery, Local, Transformative Action, Meanwhile Time, High Carbon Pathway Divergence, Health & Wellness, Utopia, Dystopia, Concatenation Crisis, Hybrid Ecologies, Tactility, Warmth, Sound Materiality, Light. Inclusion, Holistic Ecologies. Images from ‘Manifesto for a Flat Pack Painting’ iPhone 6 time lapse film’.
Residency at The Auxiliary Project Space, Middlesbrough, Funded by Arts Council England and DCMS Cultural Recovery. Selected outputs shown at MAW 21
No Dark Things (2019)
A series of mobile, flat-pack artworks were remodelled during the exhibition run in response to the gallery architecture. A final remix version of the show was presented at finnisage.
‘No Dark Things’ and ‘The Remix’ could be experienced as independent exhibitions within a single location, and it was not essential to view both, in order to take away a desire to re-examine the transitory nature of daily life. However, Hathaway speaks an authentic artistic language of disturbances and interruptions that is best experienced in this time-based format, where new beginnings are threatened, promised and carried out. These tactics for change will continue as the structures move to future sites’. (Annie O Donnell, Saturation Point Projects 2019).
Exhibition at Platform A Gallery, Middlesbrough. Photography Jason Hynes.
Where Have all the Good Times Gone? (2019)
‘As a metaphor for internet shopping and an antidote to the dark nights, Where Have All The Good Times Gone? reduces the shop window experience to a binary black and white one. Using wooden frames and fluorescent lighting the static monotone piece is a move away from the artist’s best known works in block colour but retains his unfinished non-objective theme unique to each space. So, the 24/7 Window Gallery is transformed into something topical and accessible, but thought-provoking and charming. Less the reductive dystopia the artist originally envisioned but an optimistic awakening and exploration of alternative usage and thinking. The piece itself existing outside of the main gallery space.
Indeed, from a distance after closing time the piece becomes a reimagining of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks for the Amazon generation’. (Steve Spithray, Under the Hills Nearby)
An Ideal for Living (2015)
An installation in ‘The Penthouse’ an empty residential flat on top of Dundas House, Middlesbrough. Materials found and modified in situ were shown alongside a series of architectural models.
Exhibition photography by Jason Hynes
