Two Person Show: David Gledhill and Corin Sworn

Castlefield Gallery is pleased to present a two-person show with David Gledhill and Corin Sworn that consists of new and existing work. Through painting and old media the artists extrapolate and represent personal artefacts such as photo albums, slides and diaries found at flea markets and skips. The discarded vernacular imagery – divorced from author, epoch and context – challenges our understanding of the spatial and the temporal, re-imagining and re-categorising them to enact as new instances in time and association.

Sworn’s Endless Renovation consists of a series of projected, discarded slides salvaged from a skip accompanied by a narrative spoken by the artist. The piece suggests that the images have been taken by a clock maker whose products represent an unusual relationship to time; one that loops and folds, rather than through a specific progression. Respectively, the audio text moves between theoretical discussion of the images and a collection of meandering thoughts, quoted essays and poems. A relationship gradually develops between the artist and clock maker, constructed through a meta-narrative that is at times self reflexive, seemingly probable but the degree to which it may move beyond supposition is never clear.

Gledhill’s Doctor Munscheid series of paintings are transcriptions of photographs from a family photo album discovered in Frankfurt at a flea market. The photographs, that span a nine year period in 1950s East Germany, feature scenes from the Munscheid family home and social gatherings with family and friends. The images, some of which are un-composed and include optical aberrations, add a degree of intimacy and mawkish sentimentality presenting a complex relationship between the personal and the political backdrop of the Cold War.

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