Andrew Bracey works in an expanded field of painting and uses existing sites and the readymade as alternatives to the canvas support, creating tensions between the hand-made and the man-made. Intrigued by the visual saturation of contemporary life, his work often consists of hundreds of individual elements combined to create a whole as a way of interpreting contemporary lifestyle. His practice attempts to question the role of the individual and the crowd within this changing structure, through researching a variety of separate subjects, such as the cinematic frame, the zoo and beer mats.

Andrew Bracey (born 1978) is based in Manchester. He studied Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University and MA Fine Art at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2001. He has had solo shows at galleries including: firstsite, Colchester; Transition Gallery, London; Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Mid-Pennine Gallery, Burnley. He has been included in many group shows such as John Moores 23, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; Small Mischiefs, Pumphouse Gallery, London; Swap/Vaihto, Bureau, Salford and The Cable Factory, Helsinki; and Beyond the Endgame, Manchester Art Gallery. He has taught at several Universities and is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at The University of Lincoln.

www.andrewbracey.com

Castlefield Gallery's Curatorial Approach: Trade City

Trade-Off: Andrew Bracey and Andrew Lim

Andrew Bracey and Andrew Lim’s works have been brought together through Castlefield Gallery’s project Trade-Off. Lim has used found objects within the site of the Chips building to compose an elaborate large scale structure that plays with the physics of engineering, while Bracey’s piece uses found objects on which he has painted a variety of birds that will be pinned in small flocks throughout the building. Both artists use trickery, illusion, and delusion as their visual and conceptual punch line. The editorial choices the artists make to enable an object to become less of one thing in order to become more of another thing play an important role within their practice. At what point can an object with a functional purpose be traded-off as an artwork within a gallery space and furthermore, to what extent can an object with an associative meaning migrate to another meaning and set of associations? Through precise manipulation of objects and through conduct of space the work presented will be cunning, playful and humorous.