Image Music Text

Works by Andrew Gillespie, Andrew Lacon and Joanne Masding come together in an invitation to present a show realised as an eponymous exhibition. IMAGE MUSIC TEXT is an exhibition by Division of Labour at IMT gallery with artists making work through the merging of ideas, methods and material across disciplines. This collaborative project could be thought of as exhibition-making as a process of mining in which construction materials are, through an efficient division of labour, organised or redefined as image, music and text:

image, music and text as aggregates photo-copied, torn-out, ripped-off /  the stock is marble, broken concrete, holograms and polythene clouds / pop music and high renaissance excavated from seams of educational documentation… veins of NME… lodes of museum catalogues / antiquity scoured and frack'd

All of the artists live and work in Birmingham, with studios in Studio Capri and Grand Union, strong clusters of artists and curators engaged in research and making.

Andrew Gillespie (b. 1984) lives and works in Birmingham. Andrew studied History of Art at St John's College, University of Cambridge and Fine Art, at the Ruskin School of Fine Art and Drawing, Oxford. Much of his work revolves around the application of print and the appropriation of imagery. His work adopts different forms, adhering itself to surfaces and structures. Recent exhibitions include: Looking at People, looking at art, Division of Labour, curated by Mark Essen, 2016; Mask, Hunter Whitfield, London, 2016; The Spirit of the Staircase, The Sunday Painter, London, 2015; Birmingham Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, 2015; CO (with Tom Godfrey), Nottingham Contemporary 2014; Conversation #5 (with Jack Lavender and Hannah Lees), Millington|Marriott, London, 2014. He has a forthcoming solo exhibition at the New Art Gallery Walsall, 2017.

Andrew Lacon (b. 1985) lives and works in Birmingham. Andrew studied Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London. Andrew works materially, embracing his experiences of art in his formative years, where municipal museums and churches were his encounters, and contemporary art was experienced almost explicitly through images. These experiences inform his physical responses, trying to grasp all that gets lost in the image. Recent exhibitions and projects include: Radical Sabbatical, Eastside Projects and University of Birmingham, 2016; Sculpture Garden, Recent Activity, Oxford, 2016; Research Residency, Soma, Mexico (British Council & Grand Union), 2015; Display Show, Temple bar Gallery, Dublin, 2015; Andrew Lacon (Solo show), Edel Assanti, London, 2015; Reference Works (Stuart Whipps collaboration), Guangzhou Library, China, 2014/15.

Joanne Masding (b. 1985) lives and works in Birmingham. Joanne's work is made to investigate the worth, ownership and production of physical stuff, and how this translates to a world that is growing increasingly digital, immaterial and reproducible. Recent exhibitions include: stuffs wander off, a shape steps in, Two Queens, Leicester, 2016 (solo); The Place of the Scene, Bloc Projects, Sheffield, 2015; Birmingham Show, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, 2015. She has been artist in residence at 501 Artspace, Chongqing, China; Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin, Ireland, Airspace Gallery, Stoke on Trent, and online residency, Digital Artist Residency. In 2015 she developed a residency with Berlin-based artist Katharina Ludwig, in collaboration with Grand Union, Birmingham.

Division of Labour, Worcester and London, work with artists who follow themes concerned with production, labour, and collaboration and who are interested in ideas formed from the social, political and economic structures that surround them.

#DoLdoesIMT