Fri 8 Aug – Sun 21 Sept   Gwe 8 Awst – Sun 21 Medi

Gordon Dalton (Cardiff); Chris Yeats (Newcastle), Paul Housley (Manchester/London); Paul Stone (Newcastle) and Sara MacKillop (London).

A group exhibition looking at various ideas surrounding hero worship, hopes and dreams, and the inevitable failure in trying to live up to an idealistic way of life.

Gordon Dalton’s work is concerned with real and fictional spaces, from a teenager¹s bedroom to the Wild West, and subtle interventions into everyday life. These spaces contain ideas and narratives that are impossible dreams or hopeless aspirations. Paul Housley dredges the past to reclaim banal, second-hand imagery and reanimates dead metaphors in his paintings of fragments from everyday life ­ objects, people, places. Similarly, familiar objects are transported into imaginative realms through the quiet presence of Sara MacKillop’s diminutive works that rely on deft compositional shifts; ephemeral abstract objects punctuate, rather than make any great demand on a space, acting as anti-heroic statements.

Chris Yeats’ videos, digitally manipulated photographs, and objects deal with memory, the changes of time and loss. Whether juxtaposing love poetry with dog shit, or dog collars with jewellery, Yeats is fascinated with the abject and visceral base matter. Paul Stone’s work also examines desire and disgust, attraction and repulsion. In his photographs the barriers between outside and inside, fantasy and reality are blurred and ruptured.

A darkly comic and melancholic edge runs throughout the work, but it remains playful through its use of materials and humour. The lo-fi nature of the work acts two-fold ­ that these are the simplest interpretations of an idea, and also that it reflects an embarrassed view of the world. A debunking of real and fictional myths runs through the exhibition, from looking at childhood memories and fantasies, superheroes and monsters, to spectacular landscapes and scenarios.