Inaugurating Rowing’s ‘Reverse Repeat’ series, artists Richard Healy and Jack Newling have been invited to exhibit at the same time, each inhabiting one of Rowing’s spaces, the cabinet room and main gallery. Midway through, the artists will swap spaces and inevitably compress or extend their initial proposition in order to adapt the work to its new surroundings. Reverse Repeat offers an open framework which is redefined for each exhibition by the artists and the curators, a framework where the two artists can choose to collaborate on a single exhibition, create two independent solo shows, or some mixture of the two. For this series Healy and Newling have created Prone Positions and Attachment, two distinct yet overlapping bodies of work, each placing the art object and its display centre-stage.

Central to Richard Healy’s work is the role of function. Embodied through simulations of design, Healy’s work engages with a variety of media including video, sculpture and print. Interested in the mediation of labour and material value, Healy frequently utilises digital technology as a means for artistic production together with the acts of labour that are obscured beneath the digital facade. It is around these issues of work ethics and labour roles that Healy’s work pivots, often occupying both modes of art and design.

In response to Reverse Repeat, Richard Healy has made a new body of work under the title Prone Positions. Including sculptural and floral arrangements, appropriated printed material and digital animation, the work seeks to mediate the simulation of leisure within the labour activities of both the domestic interior and the studio.

Jack Newling’s recent activity brings together minimalism and everyday consumer-domesticity to produce a series of works in a state of surrogacy, where objects become visually ‘flattened’ and visual flatness is pulled out and applied to sculptural form. These highly processed and exacting works are extracted from a contemporary landscape of industrially manufactured utilitarian provisions.

Having re-engaged with these provisions for Attachment, Newling has stripped the ‘landscape’ of its literal utility, starting to build what could be considered a kind of contemporary symbolism where use value transcends itself to become a representation of something much more theoretical, speculative and human.