The £40,000 Contemporary Art Society Annual Award 2014 has been awarded to Nathaniel Mellors. He will develop a new film, staged around Preston’s iconic brutalist bus station, for the Harris Museum’s collection.
The new film commission is part of Mellors’ Ourhouse series of works, which combine fiction, sculpture, performance and film to create an absurd and surreal hybrid style that subverts notions of taste and humour.
Produced by NOMAD, the series features local performers alongside established British actors such as Richard Bremmer (Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone), Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones) and Patrick Kennedy (Atonement).
Speaking about the new production, Mellors said: “It is a unique opportunity to consolidate recent developments in my practice and pull out some deeper weirdness, both with my amazing collaborators and through the extraordinary locations in and around Preston.
“The support and faith in my work that this award represents is impossible to put a price on, particularly from such a strong shortlist.”
Absurdist and satirical
Caroline Douglas, director of the Contemporary Art Society, said: “Nathaniel Mellors’ work connects with a tradition of absurdist and satirical filmmaking in Britain that includes such figures as Lindsay Anderson and Derek Jarman. I am delighted that the Award will enable the production of a substantial new work within Mellors’ oeuvre, and one that links so directly to the city it will be made in.”
Supported by the Sfumato Foundation, the Annual Award is now in its sixth year. It was conceived to enable one UK-based museum or public gallery to commission and acquire a new work by an artist of their choice.
Mellors and the Harris Museum were selected as the winning partnership from a shortlist of four proposals, which also included Leeds Art Gallery with Becky Beasley; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art with Marvin Gaye Chetwynd; and Whitworth Art Gallery with Martin Boyce.
The judging panel for this year’s award was comprised of Paul Bonaventura (senior research fellow in Fine Art Studies, University of Oxford), Helen Legg (director, Spike Island), Tom Morton (curator, writer and contributing editor, Frieze) and Eva Rothschild (artist).
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Artists and museums’ shortlist announced for CAS Annual Award
