We All Love The Same Boy
19th - 28th July 2024
Emmie McLuskey & Matthew Arthur Williams
Govan Workspace

We All Love The Same Boy debuts new work in progress by Glasgow based artists Emmie McLuskey & Matthew Arthur Williams.
The exhibition weaves together their distinct practices that frequently explore close collaboration with others, creating pieces that focus on friendship, community, process, sound and movement.

Taking the practice of image making as its focus, McLuskey and Williams present a series of approaches to recording and editing that centre embodiment and the choreographic as ways of opening up how we speak outside of words. Through sound, still and moving images we are guided by gestures that signal a series of intimate and felt relationships mediated through the lens of the camera. Working across a number of mediums the pair play with the apparatus as a means of carrying us through real time and decision making, prioritising one off, fleeting moments that are often overlooked. 

For the exhibition, Matthew has created eight black and white photographs that include three landscapes, three self-portraits and two portraits taken over the past year. Accompanying these images is a fragmented sound piece composed alongside classical musician Blaize Henry. The score, extracted from Matthew’s upcoming film Hello/Goodbye, draws influence from the work of composers Julius Eastman and Ryuichi Sakamoto, in order to reimagine a space of fragmented memory and lost desire. Matthew’s work often revisits sites of fractured archives that centre queer desire as a means of opening up memory as a muscle and roots that have been severed. 

Over the past year Emmie has worked with choreographer Janice Parker to lead and record movement sessions based on the alphabet with friends and colleagues in Glasgow. Focussing on discovery and each individual’s movement vocabularies as a means of exploring the meaning of each word, we are taken through a series of one off moments. As part of the project, Emmie worked with actor Petre Dobre to reinterpret the movements of the group into British Sign Language. The dual screen installation plays a selection of these movements in alphabetical order alongside Petre’s signs. The work will eventually become a children’s book titled The A - Z of Movement due to be published at the end of this year. The screens sit amongst a seating structure designed by Emmie and artist Malcolm MacKenzie in order to offer a space for viewers to sit, talk and view the works from multiple perspectives, with numerous possible configurations. Emmie and Malcolm often work together to explore alternative forms of education and community organising, working in wood being a large part of this work. 

The artists would like to thank Alex Allan, Matt Barnes, Robbie Batchelor, Liam Richardson, Théophane Catelli from Govan Project Space. Carmen Berbel, Andrew Black, Siri Black, Alasdair Campbell, Kenny Christie, Martin Clark, Anne-Marie Copestake, Maria Di Lima, Safiya Dhanani, Petre Dobre, Bishop Mae Down, Catriona Duffy, Emma Hargreaves, Annie Hazelwood, Blaize Henry, Daniel Hughes, Hannan Jones, Rob Kennedy, Mason Leaver-Yap, Eoin MacKenzie, Malcolm MacKenzie, Colm McGuire, Robert McCourt, Lucy McEachen, Martin O’Connor, Kimberley O’Neill, Denis, Rachel and Ray O’Neill, Janice Parker, Jesse and Rudi Paul, Charlie Prodger, Mark Readhead, Maeve Redmond, Scott Rogers, Akash Sharma, Lea Shaw, Sebastian Taylor, Rachael and Lauren, the Thursday night drama group at Platform Easterhouse, CCA, Glasgow, Glasgow Print Studio, Street Level Photoworks,  Cove Park, Photoworks and Ampersand. 

This exhibition is supported by Creative Scotland.