About the artists:

David Mackintosh
David Mackintosh is an artist living and working in Manchester and most recently completed his largest solo exhibition to date ‘Me, You, The Cosmos and Other People’, at Spike Island in Bristol. Mackintosh has exhibited his work extensively in the UK, Europe and America over the past 15 years including, ICA, London; Arnolfini, Bristol; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester; Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool; Rijksacademie, Amsterdam; Comme Ca NYC, New York and Galerie Felix Ringel, Düsseldorf. Mackintosh’s first monograph, 'Imagine you’re in a room full of blind fools desperately grasping at nothing', is published by Aye Aye Books and edited by Simon Morrissey. The monograph presents over 60 drawings accompanied by a critical text by the editor. ISBN 978-0-9556540-0-8. David is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Drawing, at University of Central Lancashire.

Brass Art
Brass Art are Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneké Pettican, three artists based in Manchester and Glasgow. They have worked together since 1998. Brass Art explore real space and virtual space by positioning themselves as drawings, shadows, digital sprites and performers. Sometimes they seek privileged vantage-points from which they can oversee the architecture of the city; occasionally they trespass; or occupy seemingly inaccessible realms. Central to this is their examination of thresholds or liminal spaces and the gap between public and private experience.

In recent work, the artists have used the latest body scanning and 3D printing technology to produce miniature replicas of themselves. These replica models morph with objects and become animated/activated by a travelling light source, creating a large moving shadow play. Taking the form of a surreal procession, the repeated forms of the artists are inscribed in a mythical ‘danse macabre’.

Brass Art are interested in exploring the rich potential of old and new media. Combining a fascination with pre-cinematic optical illusory devices with cutting edge 21st Century technologies, mixing traditional and contemporary skills. They have collaborated with a broad spectrum of people, from confectionery craftsmen, to architectural engineers, from jewellers to the medical division of Pentax, UK.

Josephine Flynn
Flynn’s practice critiques the language of consumer culture. The process of how constructs, hierarchies and classifications work together to legitimatize and produce meaning. Flynn is interested in how society uses the notion of freedom and how popular culture positions the self and how the self wants to be positioned. “Within in my work I use and manipulate consumer symbols from celebrities such as President Bush to Hitler to banal everyday objects such as pens, nurofen tablets and tin foil shaped like shit. I want to use the process of transgression to deconstruct these symbols and play with the construct of freedom that is offered in our culture as an act of control.” Josephine Flynn

Pat Flynn

Text from the Chapter website to accompany the artist’s solo show, ‘Draw Me A Castle’, 2007:
The seductive worlds created by Pat Flynn explore modern landscapes, historical architecture and fiction. They are hauntingly familiar, filled with hope and aspiration. From a British retail shopping mall, with its uniform Americanisation, to a reflection of a shoe shop in a shiny marble floor, he takes you into recognisable spaces that feel at first glance comfortable and safe. However, Flynn’s romantic cityscapes seem bereft of human intervention. This lack of presence coupled with the expectation of action induces a form of paralysing introspection in which you are compelled to think about daily activity, public spaces and interaction with other people.

Flynn’s work shifts from computer generated photographs to animations: from a snake that continuously moves through a peep-hole shoe, to a child’s mobile, recreating Ptolemy’s model of our solar system where the celestial bodies are reduced to small circular discs perpetually spinning around the earth. When a ‘real’ physical object does appear, it is often taken from the world he creates or from a computer game environment that influences his workFlynn studied at Staffordshire and Manchester Metropolitan Universities. Other solo exhibitions include: ‘Gas and Dust’, International 3, Manchester (2007). Group exhibitions include: ‘Ourselves Alone’, Galerie Marion Scharmann, Cologne (2006); ‘We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire’, Liverpool Biennial (2004) and ‘Out of Town’, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2002). Between 2001 and 2002, Flynn was Wheatley Fellow at the University of Central England. He lives and works in Manchester.

Magnus Quaife
The works Quaife has chosen to show in Rotate are in some ways very similar and although the approach to painting varies, the subject is basically the same. They are concerned with a relationship between painting, sculpture and photography; from painted proposals for imagined monuments that will never exist, through to intricate watercolour representations of Polaroid photographs that depict sculptures (sometimes found and sometimes constructed from the detritus of his painting practice) and oil paintings made from photographs of public sculptures.

Each time they are concerned with translating the monumental into the intimate, occasionally the public into the private and sometimes the historic into the current. The variety of painterly approaches is an attempt to prevent the viewer settling on any specific notion of style or technique in the work. Some attempt to mimic the speed of the lens through painstaking brushwork, whilst others replace the imposing stance of much public sculpture with a gestural immediacy. These series’ continue a long standing fascination the artist has with the power of painting to transform, translate, reinvent and subvert, but also to deal with more recent concerns of how painting might deal with the artistic legacy of the modernist project.

Andrew McDonald

Drawing is at the centre of what Andrew McDonald does and is for him essentially a means of escape. By losing himself in the process of drawing and escaping the world, the thing that McDonald makes, be it a drawing or a series of drawings, becomes a confrontation with the world. Animation by its nature is about time, being involved in this process allows McDonald to return to a particular minute or thirty-six seconds over a period of, say, two months.

“During certain periods of Modernism there was the idea that an artist could convey, through line and mark making, a feeling of anxiety or inner turmoil this is something that I find equally absurd and poignant. An attempt by an artist to portray an emotional state is to my mind doomed to failure, but is no less a beautiful act because of that failure. This duality is what interests me about modern art and the world we live through.” Andrew McDonald

Freee

Freee is a collective of 3 artists, Dave Beech, Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan, who work together on slogans, performances, billboards and publications that challenge the commercial and bureaucratic colonization of the public sphere of opinion formation. Freee occupies the public sphere with works that take sides, speak their mind and divide opinion.

Freee is interested in the traffic between the gallery and the street, between art’s institutions and everyday culture, and between art and politics. Works in the gallery are neither the originals of works that appear on billboard sites nor are they documents of them. Each version is simply another instance of the very same work, like a song performed at various venues, or, more pointedly, like a slogan appearing in a pamphlet, on a badge or in a chant.

On the work Protest is Beautiful, Freee say:
“As well as believing that protest is beautiful, effectively what that statement is saying is protest is more beautiful than art. Protest is more beautiful than the most beautiful art object you can imagine so therefore it reassigns the aesthetic. Our response to anyone who thought our work was visually naïve or lacking is that actually, as far as we are concerned, the visual isn’t the sign of the most important conception of beauty. The way that we conceptualize beauty is in terms of human interaction, in terms of sites in history, and in terms of co-operation and achievement.” www.freee.org.uk 

Rachel Goodyear

Rachel Goodyear’s drawings present captured moments where characters reside within an existence where social etiquette no longer, or maybe never, applied. Many are seemingly devoid of emotion or stare blankly in resignation. Each physical piece of work and the occurrences and characters they deliver are preoccupied with their own individual existence within the boundaries of the surface they are drawn upon. Therefore, when groups of drawings are shown together, further relationships start to occur, creating an ever-evolving disjointed narrative as pieces are added and taken away.

Goodyear looks for unlikely relationships in everything she encounters and an idea is just as likely to be sparked by a peculiar happening that interrupts the mundane, as a major event that changes the way she lives, as a few words lifted from an advert for car insurance. From this constant everyday cross-referencing she creates carefully constructed coincidences that are delicate in their nature and unsettling in their content.

Jesse Ash

Text from a commissioned essay to accompany The International 3 exhibition ‘A Courier’s Tragedy: Jesse Ash, Joe Devlin’:

“Ash facilitates entire new texts. His strategy for the refutation of authority is to create new content through opaque means and with it ape cultural forms that give the lie to their illusory strategies. Authoring structures and recontextualising texts and images, he casts uncertainty over the assumption of artefact, photograph and text as evidence. The video footage for ‘Harmony of the Spheres’ (2007) for instance, was garnered after a long search for an astronomer who played golf. Ash’s questions, which have been edited out, were devised to elicit an impression of eccentric causality in the subject’s associative thinking, moving between the tactile empiricism of the golf ball and the intangible infinite universe.

For ‘Review’ (2004/2007) the artist asked a critic to review a group exhibition before it was realised and then displayed the wildly contradictory review alongside the eventual show, while in ‘Broadcast’ (2006) in collaboration with Simon Clarke, song lyrics were generated from Montreal newspaper articles in the tradition of broadside ballads in Europe and The Living Newspaper in Soviet states, whereby news, propaganda and practical advice was delivered to the illiterate public.” Sally O’ Reilly

Kristin Mojsiewicz

Mojsiewicz’s practice focuses on the process of re/orientation within any given space. This experience of space involves a certain role-play, in particular using a character, such as the Navigator, as a tool for exploration. The use of role-play functions as a way to assume provisional identities in different locations or environments. More cultural interlocutor than commentator, Mojsiewicz is inveigled into existent social structures making communication, interconnection and cultural identity the main focus of her practice.

Her previous work has seen Mojsiewicz formally adopted for the duration of a show; hijacking the role of Ambassadress between twin towns in Britain and France; and re-enacting a historical Polish challenge with vodka and tongue-twisters. Her work encompasses video, audio, photography, typography, embroidery, drawing and sculptural installation.