Harry Meadley

Leeds Weirdo Club @ Headingley HEART, Jan 19

19 January 2016

Leeds Weirdo Club is presenting an artist talk at Leeds’ Headingley HEART on January 19.

Organised by the Kendra Howard and Isobel Adderley-founded student art collective A R T U R N, the conversation will follow the past, present and future of the Leeds Weirdo Club “shared self storage unit” that includes artists Harry Meadley, David Steans, Matthew Crawley and recent initiate Doug Bowen.

The group published their Leeds Weirdo Club Annual 2014 and describes itself as a ‘club’ not in the formal sense of the word but more “an anomalous art institution”. Structurally flexible and generative, they describe their collective concerns as ones that will continue to “mutate and expand organically”.

See the A R T U R N website for details.**

Harry Meadley, 'LEVEL 1' (2013). Image courtesy of Paradise Row, London.
Harry Meadley, ‘LEVEL 1’ (2013). Image courtesy of Paradise Row, London.
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Moments of Zen @ Turf Projects, Jan 8 – Feb 20

6 January 2016

Turf Projects presents Moments of Zen, new work by Harry Meadley, David McLeavy and special guest, Hatsune Miku running January 8 to February 20.

The definition of the phrase ‘Moment of Zen’ varies depending on the circumstances but it is often used when describing something that is humorously unavailable: when zen is definitely not available. The press release notes that the artists want to “attempt to contemplate the profound in the stupid and the stupid in the profound”.

David McLeavy is a Sheffield-based artist and Harry Meadley is Leeds-based. Both have had a number of solo shows across the UK. Hatsune Miku is a vocaloid persona. She is a global pop icon who has a huge reputation and has supported Lady Gaga, as well as performing on her own.

See the FB event page for details.**

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I’M Ten @ IMT, Sep 3 – Oct 2

2 September 2015

IMT Gallery is presenting I’M Ten, a benefit auction and exhibition of over 150 emerging artists running at the London gallery from September 3 to October 2, to be auctioned at Paddle8 online from September 17.

The event is being held to celebrate the 10th anniversary of IMT, features works by the likes of  0rphan Drift, Joey Holder, Larry Achiampong, Harry Meadley and David Steans, and follows last year’s Paddles ON! IRL auction of digital art in conjunction with Paddle8 online in London that featured Amalia Ulman, Sarah Ludy and Maja Cule among others.

See the IMT Gallery website for details. **

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Leeds Weirdo Club Annual 2014, May 6

6 May 2015

The Leeds Weirdo Club studio is launching a new publication titled Leeds Weirdo Club Annual 2014 at their Leeds location today, May 6.

As the working studio of artists Doug BowenMatthew Crawley, Harry Meadley (whom we previously reviewed here) and David Steans—was founded by the latter three in 2012, and engenders a collaboration amongst the four artists’ solo practices. 

Today, the three founders launch a new 200-plus-page publication, available for purchase at £20. The launch will feature special guest Gently Used, as well as free drinks.

See the event page for details. **

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Harry Meadley @ Paradise Row reviewed

12 November 2013

“The titles are super, super important”, Harry Meadley says as an instruction to viewing his work, “without the titles, (the exhibits) are just objects –it’s the title that makes them artworks”. So far, so-so; any seasoned visitor to a contemporary (or, indeed, any) art gallery can pretty much take this as a given. But here, in the Basement of London’s Paradise Row where Meadley’s LEVEL 1 exhibition has recently opened, the statement starts to make sense in a way that is both intellectually watertight and embarrassingly funny. Take ‘Still Stuck on Stage 2… (Not so clever now, are you Harry!) No, that’s the problem, I’m still being too clever’ as an example. The work is a large, red comic book arrow, mounted on the wall pointing down at the floor. It’s a typically deadpan riff on the disparity between form and implied meaning, the title serving as an almost Dadaist running commentary on the actual worth of such bourgeois-bohème theoretical investigations.

If there is a theme to Level 1, then this is the key to interpreting it. One minute the visitor can be tricked into believing that Meadley has become a victim of his own mercurial intellect, drunk on navel-gazing artspeak. The next, they find themselves staring at a framed questionnaire onto which randomly-selected members of the public have been invited to rant about what one such disgruntled candidate describes as the art world’s championing of “speculative associations without facts”. A contemporary artist willing to directly question the ‘point’ of contemporary art –can this be for real? If you can hear a rumbling in the distance, it’s the sound of the Chapman Brothers quaking in their boots.

Harry Meadley, 'LEVEL 1' (2013). Image courtesy of Paradise Row.
Harry Meadley, ‘LEVEL 1’ (2013). Image courtesy of Paradise Row.

The laughs continue with a photograph of Rihanna wearing a beanie on which the letters ‘LWC’ are written backwards. An identical bonnet is half pulled over the frame leaving one wondering, ‘what form of post-Warholian comment on mass production (etc etc) will it turn out to be?’ None, as it turns out. The title explains the hat is a symbol of something called the ‘Leeds Weirdo Club’. Parochial? Perhaps. But so what?

The lists of materials break from conformity with a lot of panache, too. The likelihood of seeing any other young artist (Meadley graduated from Leeds School of Art in 2009) listing, amongst other things a “JD Wetherspoon tombola ticket”, a “copy of the Metro” and the “DVD case for series 1 of Case Histories”, as he does in ‘Bad Day #1: Letter Rack with Self-Portrait’, is somewhat unlikely.

This very valid –and, it’s fair to state, rather brave –line of interrogation is not all there is to it. Meadley has developed a captivating and extremely distinctive visual lexicon, a mise-en-scène that neatly covers his tracks as he gleefully runs rings around art-world pomposity. The title work is a huge vinyl print of the walls of the 1992 first-person shooter videogame, Wolfenstein 3D, that covers the entirety of the exhibition space, providing an immediately unusual and arresting backdrop. It’s a fascinating vortex of illusion; Wolfenstein’s walls -immediately recognisable to any viewer past a certain age –are an impression of a 3D structure meant to be seen through a 2D screen. Except here they’ve been brought into a three-dimensional environment (which is a rather po-faced way of saying ‘the physical, tangible, real world’) and are printed flat –that is to say, two-dimensionally.

Triangles, squares and circles in bold primary colours are another recurring theme of Level 1– this is the iconography of early computer games stripped bare, wrenched away from its implied and accepted symbolism. Meadley could have titled the exhibition ‘Keep it Real’ without losing any of its intellectually startling but genuinely hilarious élan. He wants it all, and to this reviewer’s mind, he’s made an absolutely excellent fist of getting it. **

Harry Meadley’s LEVEL 1 solo exhibition is running at London’s Paradise Row from November 1 to December 6, 2013.

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