A Beagles & Ramsay solo exhibition of newly commissioned sculptural, clothing and video animations.

The exhibition was intended to mimic the flagship store of a fictional fashion house called NHOTB & RAD. It features five video animations, three collections of clothing and over one hundred sculptures. The exhibition acts as an intervention into the specific local context of the gallery, which is within the main shopping and business districts of Glasgow. There have been numerous exhibitions at GoMA that have explored the history of the building but not its location or contemporary context, and therefore this represents an original line of enquiry.

Our contention is that GoMA plays a key role in the city centre shopping-leisure-work spectacle of post-industrial Glasgow and is perfectly sited at the heart of this. For example, the new landmark office building directly opposite GoMA houses Deloitte on the upper floors and a flagship Armani store at street level. We’re aiming to investigate the intersections between the subject’s role as worker and consumer, along with the blurring of the distinctions between lifestyle and labour. As such this exhibition develops aspects of earlier work where characters ventriloquize social pathologies, and are implicated in a complex struggle to carve out space for personal and political agency.

On a theoretical level we draw upon the writing of Franco Berardi, Sianne Ngai, and Mark Fisher. Artists such as Cady Noland, Seth Price and Mike Kelley provide a practice-based context as their work draws critically upon popular and ‘spectacular’ forms within mainstream media. Our intention is to make an original contribution to this field of practice in the innovative ways that we will use new digital technologies to mimetic and uncanny effect. These artists also deal with social pathologies, and our aim is to build upon this by exploring contemporary issues relating to desire, work and lifestyle consumerism.