Venue: Cheap Cheap

A Saracen’s Head is the decapitated head of an Arab. It’s also the name of over 200 pubs in England.

Black vinyl script covers the main wall. Nastaliq text? Rorschach blotch? Alien cuneiform? Abstract Death’s Head Moth? It actually reads Matriarch/Patriarch.

What do our mothers and fathers leave us?

Small Heath, Birmingham. Barber shop, skin fade, but can you cut vampire teeth into the back? 90’s Nike tick replaced with a blood sucking ghoul. White working class culture mixing with brown working class culture. Sick fade, bro.

England is haunted and what have they left us, our mothers and fathers?

This exhibition is a 1993 fever dream brought up on horror films.

You’re inside The Saracen’s Head.

The School of Art presents 25 x 25, a series of windows into different worlds.

Each square frame is a portal into a piece of Birmingham’s history, in which Winterbourne House & Gardens, Key Hill & Warstone Lane Cemetery and the Library of Birmingham are the chosen focal points.

Level 5 Art & Design explore the stylings of Gothicism, Modernism and the Arts & Crafts movement in an attempt to bridge together a city of multitudes.

Collective Hecatomb Decline Conjecture is a series of works rattling around the limits and confines of ‘collective practice,’ a cynical reflection and catharsis drawing upon experience. Combining the pseudo-theoretical and the post-catastrophic through graphs, diagrams, ‘essays,’ aphorisms and(images of dead and injured animals, this exhibition pushes a pessimistic vision onto the future of collectivity.

An incitement of abjection and embrace of contradiction, Adam Grainger’s premier solo show can be read as an act of consolation for the melancholic. Though it was perhaps produced in the hopes of finding common ground,, a shared appreciation of the negative, or even a way out, Collective Hecatomb Decline Conjecture remains a bleak rumination on structure, structurelessness, chaos, and the micro-community.

Curated by Alice Reed and Dinosaur Kilby.

Adam will be giving a reading of Excerpts from The Black Speech at 7pm.

How do spiritual masters get their whites so white? Have people who talk about being grounded ever looked at the ground? It’s tarmac, empty tinnies, broken glass, nos canisters and ladbrokes betting slips. How can we fantasise about growing roots when everything is concrete?

An exhibition about light supremacy by Dudley & Sam Hutchinson.

Loss, grief, tears, eulogy, love, lust, sex, dysphoria, pin ups, arousal, heroines, weight, you, heavy, crying, me, webcam, living, body, fluid, cinema, history, humour, wanking, religion, falling, dad, christ, breakdown, death, life.

Ed Ruscha eat your heart out.

How to Get Attention When You’re Drowning is Leah Hickey’s first solo exhibition, which shows paintings created over the last year.

The text swirls, constricted by medium and concept, bent and sticky, the typography experimental. Leah is dealing with BIG themes. Perfection is striven for, often missed, or messed. These are outcomes of living, of working, of touch, and love, and loss.

A solo exhibition of new work by Marcus Keating. Contemporary self-portraiture that tells stories of an Australian childhood, fusing queer culture and a dislocated sense of place.

Painting here is limp and crumpled, clinging to, or fleeing from the stretcher and wall. Bruised rainbow canvases imparted with whispers of biographical truths.

Pastel hanging doorways and propped signposts are markers that point to early trauma and threads common to all human life.

A solo exhibition of new work by Marcus Keating. Contemporary self-portraiture that tells stories of an Australian childhood, fusing queer culture and a dislocated sense of place.

Painting here is limp and crumpled, clinging to, or fleeing from the stretcher and wall. Bruised rainbow canvases imparted with whispers of biographical truths.

Pastel hanging doorways and propped signposts are markers that point to early trauma and threads common to all human life.

Poster by @_elizaja_

The Sompsons

Digbeth First Friday – Nov 5th 2021 6pm-8pm
Nov 6th 2021 11am-2pm

Open by appointment after this until 12th Dec 2021

💛💛💛💛💛💛💛💛

Hi-Diddily-Ho Neighborino!

You may remember Cheap Cheap from such shows as ‘OFF-SITE’ or ‘Messages from the M11’

The Sompsons, eh? A group exhibition comprising artists from across the UK. The Simpsons has been an overwhelming cultural phenomenon, and clearly an impact on artists’ practices. Come and experience painting, drawing, moving image, sculpture, photography, collage and more!

But please note that some of the work is not child appropriate, so I have indeed thought of the children! Ha Ha (Nelson Voice)

If anyone wants me, i’ll be in my room (68a Lombard Street) and if you don’t like the exhibition

You can eat my shorts!

Artists –
Maxx Gentleman / Teflon Springs
Foka Wolf
Dandy-day Heffernan
Mixed Milk
Ambie Drew
Jack Squires
Chris Thompson
Lara Beasley
Fred Hubble
Bag Lord
Elizabeth Gray and Mrs Art
@that_soggy_nugget
Bethan Jayne
Bethan McKnight
Craig David Parr
Chris Lambourne
Vega Maguire