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Inside a small room at Milburn + Arte, two Newcastle artists, lan McArthur and French born, Minou, built a joint work, a microcosm born out of the declining industrial environment of Newcastle. It included sculpture, painting and assemblage.
Forgotten objects, rusted steel, smashed TV sets, mangled circuit boards and much more decaying material from "the City of Enterprise" were the major ingredients of the work. Combining these raw materials with individual styles and a common philosophy, the artists put together a collection of work suggesting the relationship between the past and today's technological, yet unimaginative, society that readily regards junk as irrelevant and useless material to be disregarded in the march of so-called "progress".
Much of Minou 's work reveals a stylized approach, in particular a series of sculptures that could well be commissioned as models for futuristic power plants. They are very delicate, made from cardboard cones and scrap rubber glued together and then painted in definite visual patterns. His large canvasses, in which a mass of diagonal lines criss -cross suggesting depth, appeared to be abstract images of heavy steel structures and machinery with conflicting geometrical shapes and angles.
In contrast McArthur's work is very raw. Many of his materials are assembled onto a wooden framework in their "natural" state, and although striking oil colours are what immediately capture one's attention, it is the very unsophisticated manner in which he has re-used these artifacts that makes his work so different from the mainstream. The variety of icons painted onto his assemblage sculptures and printed on fabric that hung from floor to ceiling on the four walls, were all part of this total ideology.
McArthur's stack of smashed TV's