NETTIE HORN | The Manchester Contemporary

KIM RUGG| View more works by Kim Rugg >

NETTIE HORN is pleased to present a solo exhibition presenting new works by Kim Rugg. Rugg is renowned for her meticulous and labor-intensive work which involves deconstructing and slicing an object into minute shards to then re-organise and reconstruct it according to arbitrary codes. The original meaning is removed in order to reveal new ones, and to corrupt or destroy the object’s function. This act of mischievous “sabotage” is applied to ephemeral and iconic objects such as newspapers, comic books, product boxes, sweaters and stamps, and more recently to larger formats such as wallpaper – and, by doing so, she turns a neutral vehicle for a message into an object to be considered.

By giving value to something which would normally be disposed of, Rugg transgresses conventional systems by obliterating what is conceived to be the important element, “the content”, and retaining everything else, the material, the shapes, the typography, the colour palettes and the layout. Through the new works presented in the exhibition, she continues her investigation into the relationship between images and their signifier. She questions the way in which the information we process daily is preconceived and prompts the viewer to consider the familiar from an entirely new perspective.

For example, in Rugg’s comic book pieces, she recreates in a 2D image the 3D distortions inherent to the object. She destabilizes what is understood and assumed to be true by short-circuiting the mental adjustments we make when recalling images which are often free of the distortions of perspective, scale and distance. Her focus lies in making an object that represents an image rather than an image that represents an object.

Whilst visually being very different, Rugg's stamp and envelope pieces retain their original function and are sent through the mail unperturbed. Here she attempts to see just how far she can deconstruct them and still make them work as stamps by posting the resulting piece. A majority of envelopes arrive at their destination due to the fact that the value of the stamp is held in its very materials, the pigments, rather than the image these inks form. Consequently, these works are far more subversive as, to a degree, they actively undermine established, regulated systems.

The work with striped sweaters is reminiscent of a life drawing exercise where students are required to draw imaginary ‘ latitude’ lines all around a body and follow them as they rise and fall to express the contours, swellings and hollows of a body. Horizontally striped sweaters have the same effect - the straight lines of the unworn sweater become topological curves that reveal the shape and volumes of the body wearing them.

Despite living in an age of new technologies, notions of labour and handicraft are central to Rugg’s practice. What some may take as obsolete handiwork represents in fact another unconventional choice of hers to use low-tech procedures and obsessive qualities which contrast with the raw and ephemeral nature of the materials she works with.

Kim Rugg was born in 1963 in Montreal, Canada and now lives and works in London. Rugg graduated with a MFA from the Royal College of Art, London in 2004 where she was awarded the Thames and Hudson prize. Recent exhibitions include Don’t Mention the War, PPOW, New York, USA; Text/ural, OKOK Gallery, Seattle, USA; Billboard Text Art, Tina B, Prague, Czech Republic; Don’t mention the war, Mark Moore Gallery, Santa Monica, USA.