John Peter Askew

10 May – 18 August

Alongside his exhibition in the NGCA main gallery, Sunderland University graduate John Askew presents large-scale photographs realised especially for this show.

Unusually, this show will take three consecutive parts. For one month each, Askew will present only one work or two works at a time, taking the form of beautiful, large-format analogue prints created from the series ‘We’. In the main gallery downstairs, we encounter hundreds of works – a panorama in which the whole of human life is visible: an exhibition like a novel, covering nearly thirty years of life lived in the Russian city of Perm, nearly 1,000 miles east of Moscow.

Upstairs in the collection space, we encounter individual works from the series and also ‘Presence’, a study of the artist’s mother in which we struggle to make recognition, to make contact with another person. Askew invites us to ask who ‘we’ are, and to see past our differences by rethinking the limits of who we can imagine as ‘us’.