Mathew Wayne Parkin

Ruin me

In a white gallery space, a dark hand printed photo of a pipe is attached to a light wooden frame.


12 April – 2 May 2024
Vessel Gallery, York St John University

Phrases from the incident report
 
Origin of call: Person (mobile)
 
-Property-Building-Non Residential-Entertainment and culture-Other cultural venue
 
Steam rooms/sauna
 
Fire spread through gaps or voids in construction
 
Water tender
 
Thermal imaging camera
 
Axes/Hammers/Crowbars/Croppers
 
roof involved on arrival

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In this solo exhibition, Mathew Wayne Parkin uses installation, emotion, and photography to approach the idea of contemporary queer ruins. Through acts of re-staging, tracing, and documentation, the work engages with the ghost architecture of a gay sauna.

The photographs were developed in a darkroom using expired photo paper and alternative processing techniques. These images are housed within provisional wooden structures that function as architectural interventions—shaping how bodies move through the gallery space and incorporating sensory elements. This architecture forms a kind of palimpsest, layering over a site already marked by adaptation and transformation.

The exhibition forms part of a wider research project examining the aftermath of a fire at a Yorkshire gay sauna in the 2010s. It considers how to work with archival absence through strategies of fabulation, oral history, and video-making.

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Ruin Me, all works, 2024
Wood, photographs printed on expired paper (Kentmere, Illford, Barclay, Jessops) with a range of process, space heaters, Patrick Cowley: School Daze (2013) played intermittently in the space, watercolour painting, mixed media.

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Installation shot of a thin wooden fame with hand printed photographs in a range of clarity due to differing development and paper types attached to the frame in a white gallery with subtle red lighting and some patches of red brick wall. On the back wall hangs a photograph next to a drawing on paper.
Installation shot of a thin wooden fame with a off-colour hand printed photograph attached to the frame in a white gallery with subtle red lighting and some patches of red brick wall. On the back wall hangs a two photographs next to each other.
Installation shot of a thin wooden fame with hand printed photographs in a range of clarity due to differing development and paper types attached to the frame in a white gallery with subtle red lighting and some patches of red brick wall. On the back wall hangs a photograph next to a drawing on paper.
Installation shot of a thin wooden fame with a off-colour vignetted hand printed photograph of a clearing in an overgrown wasteland attached to the frame in a white gallery with subtle red lighting.
On a white wall with subtle red lighting hangs two off-colour hand printed photographs side by side, the photograph on the right is just a clouded over grey.
On a grey gallery floor with red lighting is the foot of a thin wooden frame with a rough grey rock with white discolouration on it.
On a white wall with subtle red lighting hangs two off-colour hand printed photograph of branches in a wasteland with a space heater at the bottom the wall.
On a white wall with subtle red lighting and some exposed shiny tile bricks is a yellow coloured black and white photograph. On the adjacent wall to the left is a watercolour drawing on paper.
On a white wall with subtle red lighting hangs an abstract yet clearly phallic red watercolour painting.
Installation shot of a thin wooden fame with a off-colour hand printed photograph attached to the frame in a white gallery with subtle red lighting and some patches of red brick wall.
Installation shot of a thin wooden fame with a off-colour hand printed photograph attached to the frame in a white gallery with subtle red lighting and some patches of red brick wall. On the back wall hangs a two photographs next to each other. On the back wall hangs a photograph, and in the foreground on the wooden frame is a photograph of a pipe emerging from a rough wall.
Installation shot of a thin wooden fame with a off-colour hand printed photograph attached to the frame in a white gallery with subtle red lighting. On the back wall hangs a photograph, and at the bottom of the wall is a space heater.
Installation shot of a thin wooden frame with a off-colour hand printed photograph attached to the frame in a white gallery with subtle red lighting and some patches of red brick wall. On the back wall hangs two photographs next to each other.