Online
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Tayo Adekunle
10 Jun - 11 Jul 2021 Online Workplace Foundation is pleased to present the first online solo show of Edinburgh based photographer Tayo Adekunle.
Adekunle uses self-portraiture to expose issues of race, gender and sexuality whilst investigating racial and colonial history. Through re-working historical stereotypes she highlights the fetishisation, sexualisation and western gaze on black female bodies. This exploration runs throughout her series Reclamation of the Exposition and Venus Noire as well as her most recent work Yemoja to create a rich presentation of the colonial perception of the black female body.
Sarah Baartman - a Khoikhoi woman from South Africa named 'Hottentot Venus' who was brought to Europe in 1810 and exhibited in Britain and France - was the catalyst for Adekunle’s exploration into the past and present treatment of the black female body. Through referencing ‘master’ painters in her compositions, Adekunle brings to light whichfemale bodies were depicted and confronts the viewer with this fact.
Adekunle references her Nigerian heritage and draws on personal connections to the fabrics used for sets in each image. The use of contemporary western clothing as well as more traditional Nigerian textiles demonstrates that these perceptions and issues are still very much rooted in the present.
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. The exhibition will be accompanied by an In Conversation and Artist Tour, more information to follow. Read more -
Noel Clueit
Lockedgroove 11 Mar - 11 Apr 2021 Online 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. Read more
