12 June – 25 July
Beagles and Ramsay are known for their elaborate and theatrical installations which involve video, sculpture, photography and performance. Over the past seven years these installations have often centred on a number of adopted alter-egos and mutated self-portraits, and ‘New Meat’ features a series of specially commissioned works that develop this longstanding preoccupation. The duo have created a further series of doppelgangers possessed with a horrific beauty and mordant humour.
Phase IV presents the artists as a chimeric mass of indistinguishable fragmented body parts. A beguiling slice of Grand Guignol, this grotesque tableau reduces the artists to tumescent lumps of meticulously rendered rotting flesh and coagulated blood.
In an accompanying installation a pair of motorised, rotating glitter-ball skulls offers a mesmeric vision, more seductive than visceral. A third self-portrait pairing, Dumbstruck, features twinned ventriloquist dummy self-portraits shown with large-format gilt framed photographs and new video performance works made for Chapter.
Beagles & Ramsay have worked collaboratively since 1997. Recent solo exhibitions include Gasworks Gallery London, YYZ Toronto and Floating IP Manchester. Group exhibitions include ‘Zenomap’ at the Venice Biennale 2003, ‘Videodrome’ at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and ‘Dub’l Introoder’ at Transmission, Glasgow. In October they will show new work at the PS1 MOMA Contemporary Art Centre, New York.
‘New Meat’ features work commissioned by Chapter and is supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.
A catalogue produced to coincide with the exhibition documents Beagles and Ramsay’s self-portrait based works made since 1997. The catalogue features texts by Patricia Ellis and Catherine Austin.
Chapter Arts Centre, Market Road, Canton, Cardiff, Wales UK
