Found Objects, dimensions variable, 2007-9

Usually working within painting and photography, the use of found objects in TradeCity is something of a departure for Butler. An interest in chance compositional elements persists; the previous use of ‘variables’ introduced in the painting process are provided here by the pragmatic actions of others; whilst curiosity in the interpretation of abstract forms usually reserved for the viewer, is extended to two stages including the artist himself.

Chris Butler was born in 1980, in Stafford, UK. An Art, Design and English graduate of University College Northampton, Butler currently works as a freelance art technician in numerous Manchester galleries. A musician as well as regularly exhibiting, Butler recently co-curated the Chance Encounters and After Hours events at The Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester.

100th Monkey Curatorial Approach: Trade City

Continuing 100th Monkey’s ongoing interest in the role of work-life in the life-life of the artist, we are pleased to present new work by Chris Butler and Suzanne Smith.

Butler shows discarded objects gathered whilst working as an art technician in the City’s galleries. In a necessary attempt to incorporate his working and artistic life, he embarks on a mission to keep and create, dividing his attention at work between the task in hand and the selection of fruitful objects. For Trade City Butler presents this decision to choose as well as the visible traces of his own labour.

Considered alongside Butler’s objects, Suzanne Smith’s specially commissioned text piece opens up the discussion to consider the wider consequence of working-to-survive in the output of the emerging artist, the conflict between the necessary slog of financially sustaining an art practice and ensuring that art practice warrants sustaining. Whilst working in the office of a city art unit, Smith ruminates on the influence of work environment on the artist’s resultant practice - art about art and art about typing.