Harris Museum & Art Gallery
Nathaniel Mellors (b.1974, Doncaster, UK) makes irreverent, absurd and hilarious videos, sculptures, performances and writings that challenge notions of taste, morality, and intelligence. Recent solo exhibitions include Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014); ICA, London (2011); De Hallen, Haarlem (2010); and the Stedelijk Museum Bureau in Amsterdam (2009). Recent group shows include British Art Show 7 – In The Days of the Comet (2010–11); Altermodern at Tate Britain (2009); and the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Mellors lives and works in Amsterdam and Los Angeles.
Mellors’s work is uniquely imaginative, critical and ambitious in its approach. Mellors proposes to write, produce and direct New Preston & Cannibal Cinema Tech, an ambitious moving image work reflecting on the state of the UK through an experimental, absurdist fiction, realised using locations and production facilities specific to Preston. His current practice and this film commission are set within the expanding architecture of Mellors’s ongoing Ourhouse body of works.
The remarkable Brutalist (recently Grade II listed) bus station, the derelict Odeon cinema, the abandoned Coroner’s Court and the former Working Men’s Club will all be used as locations for the commission – a hybrid form of fiction, sculpture, performance and film. The work, comprised of a single-screen video, will use the fabric and social history of the city as a lens for an absurdist fiction incorporating a tribe of smart Neanderthals, a filthy cluster of cannibalising Homo sapiens and two characters going by the name of Babydoll and Daddy.
Presented by the Contemporary Art Society, 2014, through the Annual Award, funded by the Sfumato Foundation and Museum Victoria, Melbourne. Commissioned by Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston.