Accompanying Oak Effect, a major new installation at the Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead, Matthew Darbyshire will be giving an artist talk and tour of the exhibition.
Oak Effect comprises a collection of objects chosen by Matthew Darbyshire from the Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums Collection. Displayed within a framework comprised of dining tables, worktops and nesting tables, the juxtaposition of real and synthetic woods sets up a tension between the authentic and the artificial: a symbolic landscape which makes us acutely aware of the histories that for better or worse we still inhabit.
Matthew Darbyshire’s work exposes a history of things, highlighting a visual language of commodity culture and making us aware of the ideology of objects, the fracture between what we seek in consumable ‘things’ and the reality of what they actually present to us.
The installation was displayed at Bloomberg Space, London in April 2013 and is a collaboration between Bloomberg SPACE, Tramway Glasgow and Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums.
Matthew Darbyshire was born in the UK in 1977. He studied Fine Art at the Slade School of Art and at the Royal Academy Schools in London.
Darbyshire has had solo exhibitions at Herald Street, London; Gasworks, London; The Hayward Project Space, London; Tramway, Glasgow; Taro Nasu, Tokyo and Jousse Enterprise, Paris. His work was included in Tate Britains Triennial Altermodern, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud in 2009, and the British Art Show 7 Days of the Comet, curated by Tom Morton and Lisa Le Feuvre in 2010.
This event is free of charge. To reserve a place please email: matthew@contemporaryartsociety.org