FIFTY GRAND IN STUDENT LOANS AND ALL I GOT WAS A SHOW AT SCREW GALLERY

2nd September- 17th September

Installation Images

Education can be a funny business, and that's really the main problem. The increased corporatisation of education (and everything else) in the UK makes it harder for teachers to reach and for students to learn, with rampant price gouging of a captive marker (thanks SLC) there isn't even the capitalist illusion of competition to prop up the industry, with seemingly no recourse against an increasingly hostile environment towards anyone trying to do anything other than make a profit within the higher education system.

The students aren't to blame - for the most part the teaching and technical staff aren't either - its the same issue we see with everything from gas and electric to public transportation, a callous and uncaring minority driven by a desire for personal wealth who prop themselves up with an impenetrable, dehumanising labyrinth of bureaucracy and even when everyone on God's green earth spent 2020 instagramming pastel coloured iPad drawings telling us to EAT THE RICH, we failed to create even a speed bump on our road to decline.

In the face of all this overwhelming negativity, people are still going to art school in droves and the thing that connects them is a desire for something different - a freedom from what seems like an oppressive world without space for expression, contemplation, reconsideration or resistance. To study art is to take on an autonomy in the face of a culture that tells us we are wasting our time, our money and creating a precarious future for ourselves, which may well be true, but still prospective students in their thousands flood applications every year. I believe it's this desire for change, to slow things down and appraise, to do something beyond what we're told is possible that characterizes the desire to study art in the 2020s.

On show here are some of the most exciting graduating artists since the inception of SCREW, early career artists who have fought the circumstances brought by the pandemic, collapsing economy and increased government hostility towards supporting contemporary art to produce exceptional, visionary bodies of work. The common thread in their work is a desire to explore what it means to live in this stage of late-capitalism, to look inward and to look back to define new paths for the future and to resist a culture that barks for stringent, defined paths through their own right to consider carefully, meander, explore and ultimately make artworks of value.