Post residency interview ‘He is Dead and He is Going to Die.’

'I took to dribbling down my front' Oil on wood

“Playfully descriptive titles cannot hide or disguise the melancholy sense of loss, impermanence and dislocation haunting Sebastian Trend and Adam Hogarth’s work.”

Adam Hogarth and Sebastian Trend have been residents at the Pop Up Gallery since the 14 September, showing their multi-media exhibition of screen prints, photography and new video pieces

With the end of their residency at the Pop Up Gallery drawing near, we caught up with Adam Hogarth to talk about how their exhibition ‘He is Dead and He is Going to Die’ has been received in Middlesbrough.

We Are Open: So, for anyone who missed your exhibition, could you describe the influences and techniques behind the work?

Ok, so obviously the collection of work is called “He is dead and he is going to die”
and it references Roland Barthes' book about the essence of photography, the books called ‘Camera Lucida’ and is concerned with the ‘domestic photograph’

The process pretty much starts with photographs, family photographs, but it is the domestic photograph, so its not necessarily just family, there are pictures of pets as well, and ex girlfriends, this is the starting point for the two different sets of mine and Sebastian’s work.

Sebastian is concerned with the impermanence of photographs, he paints the photographs in with bleach then they’re re-interpreted into oil paintings. He’s really interested in having a dripping quality, that’s why he started using bleach in the first place, it give his work a viscous quality, he uses layers of gesso so it almost looks like wet paint.

(Adam) Mine is screen prints, my work is more interested with sentimentalities of imagery, some of my work has an obsessive streak, so I’ll do things like repetitive tasks, a lot of my work was animation, drawing similar cells over and over again, or the dart board where I’ve been throwing darts at an object loads of times, or even the screen printing process which is a repetitive process. My work titles reference dart slang, there’s ‘Three in a bed’ which is a darts term for 3 darts in one number, diaper dart, black dog and madhouse which is a double one finish.

'Three in a bed' Screen print

We Are Open: Tell us a bit about the new installations?

(Adam) My film is a photograph that’s been placed on a dartboard, and had three darts thrown at it, for every three darts that hit it, its been scanned into a computer, the process is repeated, a few thousand times, then its turned into a stop frame animation. Sebastian’s films are photographs that have had bleach pored onto them, the whole emotion of the photograph slowly taken off the face of the photograph, so by the end of the film, you’re just left with a blank photo.

We Are Open: So how have you found the residency? Has the space worked out well for your exhibition?

It’s a good space, well lit and in a good location! You get plenty of people walking in; it’s a good place to respond to as an artist. We’ve had this exhibition shown in Narc magazine, we’ve had a lot of punters coming in, commenting on how good it is,
The opening night was really nice as well!

We Are Open: Do you think having a Pop Up Gallery exhibition has helped you as an artists?

At the moment we’re just in a position where we’ve graduated and just starting to exhibit on our own and figuring out our own practice without external support. This kind of exhibition helped build on that really, build up to the next stage as an artists.


We Are Open: So what next now the exhibitions finished?

(The Art) is probably going to get taken back to the studios and used for my next pieces of work, so this dartboard piece with the picture in the middle (“Stadium”) that’s going to be used in a series of screen prints I’m going to produce, that’s called around the clock, it's going to be pictures of the royal family, with darts thrown at them. So, yeah, it’s just back to the studio for us to get on with making work!