Reb Sangster uses painting and modelling software to create work that explores anxieties around loss of agency and the dissolution of boundaries between the self and the ‘other’ via distorted depictions of the body’s surface.

Sangster’s process involves taking images sourced from the internet and manipulating them using digital sculpting software. The work becomes a negotiation between the integrity of the original image and digital sculpting tools that corrupt it. New images are then created from these renders and used as references for the oil paintings which are meticulously painted in several layers over a number of weeks. The process of making the work is one where the body of source materials - of different surfaces created from digital image making, sculpting and filters - is realised within the traditions of painting. The final work is therefore the result of different materials, histories and speeds of production brought together in mutual dissolution.

By producing paintings of a disturbed body politic, Sangster explores the typically horrific visual imagery which accompanies the emergence of novel technologies, brought by the collective crisis of subjectivity which erupts in their wake. Here skin and surface become a stand in for border confrontations on many fronts. Fear and conspiracy thrive in these stand-offs for identity, as does liberation and the possibility of new futures, as the desire to understand the self is necessarily enmeshed with envisioning the ‘other’ as a threat or a saviour.

Education
Goldsmiths, MA Contemporary Art Theory, 2019 – 2021
Camberwell UAL, BA Fine Art Painting, 2011 – 2014

Exhibitions
(Solo) Cohabit in Dust, Caustic Coastal, Manchester
(Solo) Solow, Caustic Coastal, Manchester
Daytona, Caustic Coastal, Manchester (with Rebecca Ackroyd and Gabriel Birch)

Publications
Low Theory, Curated by Kate Wong

Residencies
Into The Wild, Chisenhale Art Space