Prequel Dump

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Nathaniel Mellors
Prequel Dump
February 27 - April 16, 2016 (EXTENDED)

Opening Reception: Saturday, February 27, 6-9PM
Ourhouse Episode -1: 'Time' screens on the hour

****Notes from the Perma-Present****

Prequel Dump is Nathaniel Mellors’ first solo exhibition at The Box. The installation combines the video works Ourhouse (2010-16), Neanderthal Container (2014) and Giantbum (2008) with the vomiting animatronic sculpture The Object (2010), new sculptures, photograms & paintings.

***BROWN REASONS TO LIVE***

Mellors’ epic scatological fantasies are full of wry-humour and big themes: language, technology, art, ownership, cavemen, cannibalism & excrement.

**Object eats Subject**

Ourhouse (2010 - ) Conceptual sculpture meets British TV drama. 5 episodes.
The eccentric Maddox-Wilson family’s lives are destabilized when their house (‘Ourhouse’) is occupied by The Object (Brian Catling), whom the family fail to recognise as a human-being, each perceiving a different form in its place. The Object yields strange power over words and begins to eat the family’s books; processing their story inside its guts. Each episode of the series is determined by the texts The Object consumes, half-digests and sicks-back-up.

“All my toilets are made with Aztec porcelain and will have a brutalist trim.”

Ourhouse Episode -1: Time (2015-16)
The family have inhabited the northern wing of Ourhouse with holidays in mind but lose one of their group to a pair of passing Neanderthals after Charles ‘Daddy’ Maddox-Wilson (Richard Bremmer) announces his imminent celebrity. The Object is consuming The Eternal Present - a book covering 35,000 years of European cave-art. Meanwhile Ourhouse has become inundated with surveillance technology through the expansion and rise to power of a gentleman-criminal called Davis (Patrick Kennedy), a plumber hired by the family in 1999 to “do the pipes” who has evolved into…something else. Charles has invented a revolutionary new theory of time - but Davis, one step ahead, has invented a time-travelling toilet - the ‘T.T.T.’. Charles’ subsequent attempts at time-travel go awry as the family find themselves duped, cannibalised and trapped inside a permanent-present…

*Bird-headed man with a stiffy*

In Neanderthal Container (2014) a Neanderthalised stunt-dummy falls from a plane over the San Joaquin Valley, crashing to earth over and over again. Mellors conceived of the falling figure as depicting an ‘absolute exterior’ and these falling sequences are punctuated by more fragmentary and improvised sequences representing the Neanderthal’s interior - a film-set populated by four different versions of the Neanderthal character (all played by Patrick Kennedy) who reflect on their condition and position “inside the Neanderthal stunt-dummy...which is actually a spaceship.”

“If you eat yourself, eat yourself… do you shit yourself?”

Giantbum - Stages 1 & 2 (2008)
It’s 1213 AD. Sir Boss (Gwendoline Christie), The Truthcurator (David Birkin) & their crypto-medieval phalanx have been accidentally eaten by a Giant and need to avoid starvation and digestion and find THE EXIT. But “there is no outside!” The group are (mis)led by their religious leader The Father (Johnny Vivash) - a kind of poo-crazed medieval spin doctor, who has achieved an idiosyncratic form of immortality through cannibalism and coprophagia. From scatology to eschatology, Giantbum is a pious critique of cultural reenactment, recycling, re-staging & re-ligion. 

Chris Bloor & Nathaniel Mellors: The Dinosaur Moderne (2015 - ∞)
New collaborative paintings by Bloor & Mellors -
Prehistory as a lens for the present.
Transitional epochs.
Jurassic Parquet.

Nathaniel Mellors (b. Doncaster, UK, 1974) recent exhibitions include The Great Acceleration – Taipei Biennial (2014), The Sophisticated Neanderthal, Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin (2014), NEW_CAVE_ART_NOW, Stigter van Doesburg (2014); HAMMER Museum, Los Angeles (2014), Ourhouse E.3 feat. BAD COPY, Matt’s Gallery, London & Salle de Bains, Lyon 2012; I.C.A., London (2011); ILLUMInations - the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); :hypercolon:, SMART Project Space, Amsterdam (2011), Cobra Museum, Amstelveen (2011), British Art Show 7 - In The Days of the Comet (2010-11), Hayward Gallery, London (touring).

Awards: 2014 Contemporary Art Society Prize, 2011 Cobra Art Prize.

Ourhouse -1, ‘Time’ presented by the Contemporary Art Society, 2015, through the Annual Award funded by the Sfumato Foundation with the support of the National Gallery of Victoria - Melbourne, the Mondriaan Fund and Arts Council England. Commissioned by the Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston. Produced by Nathaniel Mellors & Nomad Projects.