Noel Clueit

Workplace Foundation is pleased to present Lockedgroove, a solo exhibition by Manchester based artist Noel Clueit. Bringing together a new body of work, Lockedgroove continues Clueit’s exploration into the conflicts of value and meaning around the production of art. Employing a multidisciplinary practice the artist investigates the shifting relationships between art and non-art objects and the instances in which they collide. An avid collector of records for many years, Clueit began to amass LP’s for the sleeve design rather than the musical content. Drawn to an element of a design that evokes an echo of abstraction, Clueit undertakes an elegant and meticulous process of slicing, inverting and re-positioning to create new compositions, arrangements and possibilities. The majority of the records are from the 1970s, the height of production and consumption of the album format. The cover designs of this era often appropriated forms from high art produced in the preceding years, most evidently the abstract expressionist works of the New York School. The relegation of these forms to the cover of a Reader’s Digest easy listening boxset, exemplify this lowbrow mass market appropriation. Through a rigorous methodology, Clueit’s works seek to return these borrowed forms to the canon of art. This exhibition is presented online inside a detailed virtual rendering of our first gallery space: Workplace Gallery, 34 Ellison Street, Gateshead, which opened in 2005 within the British Brutalist masterpiece Trinity Court designed by Rodney Gordon for Owen Luder Partnerships, and which was demolished in 2009.

Everything Must Go (part 2) marks the launch of Workplace Foundation’s ‘Community of Artists’. An acknowledgement that a new form of representation is called for that looks beyond a traditional art market ‘commercial gallery’ model towards the value that artists and their relationships bring to a place.

on the side Agnes Calf, Noel Clueit, Philip Frankland, Susie Green 17 September - 29 October 2016 WORKPLACE GATESHEAD

Eric Bainbridge Noel Clueit Marcus Coates Jo Coupe Jacob Dahlgren Rachel Foulion Dean Hughes Rachel Lancaster Eftihis Patsourakis