Veris Artists in Conversation with George Vasey

Curator and Writer George Vasey leads a conversation with Verisimilitude artists Luke Beech, Garth Gratrix and Kitty McKay about their work within the exhibition and dives deeper behind the themes of appearance and truth.

This is a free event as part of the Turner on Tees wrap around activities which are taking place across the Tees Valley, commissioned in collaboration with MIMA and programmed by Penny Payne & Will Hughes.
Luke Beech

Beech is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work draws on the rituals and pressures of masculinity.

Sport and outdoor pursuits are bent and recoded, rewriting social norms revealing performances

of tenderness and violence. From a queer position both inside and adjacent to masculinity, Beech isolates its gestures and rituals, allowing shifts in posture and balance to expose what they conceal.

@lukebeechartist

Gratrix moves along the line of formal structure, architectures, systems and materials and ‘frolic’ as a necessary counterpart, embracing queerness, joy, mischief, and care. The tension or oscillation between these states is a reminder that serious work can still hold play, and that play can still hold purpose. The works make room for multiple readings simultaneously, and trust the viewer to find their own way in.

@garthgratrix

garthgratrix.com

McKay is preoccupied with the ways public space is made and unmade. Their practice is informed by feminist, queer and crip frameworks for understanding, and overcoming the way power constructs space. Her work seeks through the reuse of municipal materials to reposition typically structured authoritarian frameworks.

@kittmck

George Vasey is a curator and writer. He has curated over 50 exhibitions for museums and galleries across the UK. He has curated projects for organisations including BALTIC, Leeds Art Gallery, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Wellcome Collection and many others. In 2017 he was curator on the Turner Prize as part of Hull City of Culture. His writing has been published widely in books and magazines, and he has a long track record advocating for and supporting artists at formative moments in their career. He is currently Co-Chair at Grand Union, a member of the Association of International Art Critics (AICA-UK) and a 0.6 Senior Lecturer in Curating at Teesside University.

@georgevasey