CityLife

Castlefield Gallery is pleased to present a two-person exhibition with Leo Fitzmaurice and Kim Rugg consisting of both new and existing work. Through the dissecting and re-arranging of mass produced information based material, such as newspapers, brochures, comics and packaging, the artists fragment our visual and cognitive understanding of images and text, and force us to reconsider the familiar from a completely new perspective.

Fitzmaurice’s interest is in the material substance of communication rather its content; his work comments on a world of ever increasing commercial information through a sense of dysfunctionality within our environment reordering his publicity material to construct aesthetic revelations. Rugg, on the other hand, is more selective of content; sourcing newspaper front pages that feature significant world events, meticulously cutting out each letter, rearranging them in alphabetical order; or cutting postage stamps into tiny shards, rearranging them on the envelope and sending them through the postal system unperturbed, her work is delicately subversive.

Reducing the objects to their material substance, the artists obliterate their discernable function, undermining or sabotaging the original message. Through the use of mundane materials, their work can be seen to reconcile both the dexterity of labour intensive craft with that of cultural, social and political undertones imbuing a sense of playful dissent.