Mike Stubbs
Mike is interested in how we shape our everyday worlds and how we seek meaning and significance in the fabric of daily life and communication.
Subjects Mike explore’s in their work include machines, work, innovation, ecology, geology, class and identity. Mike spend’s time observing and enjoy the ambiguity and mystery, often capturing surreal scenarios and ambience. Lucidity is fleeting as is life with humanity seeming more precarious than ever with a climate emergency in our face; Mike is an increasingly conflicted petrol head.
Mike’s practice brings together experiences as an artist working in the early days of video art, filmmaking, performance and TV with curating, through a process of interdisciplinary research and residency, often in collaboration with other artists and communities and at times on a large stage.
Mike will bring a project ‘Climate Emergency Services’ to Middlesbrough Art Week. Climate Emergency Services (CES) is a ‘conflicted’ vehicle and artwork, aiming to evoke and challenge our love / hate relationship with motor vehicles in a period becoming characterised by our increasing fear of climate change.
The conflicted quality of the artwork’s message is condensed into the contract between the exterior and interior of the vehicle. Outside, the bodywork references the high temperature culture of car modification for ‘high performance’ and the linkage between the conspicuous consumption of oil and ‘the apocalyptic’. Inside, the cabin is designed to evoke a science laboratory that might be plotting the environmental indicators triggered by climate change, and a place of cool optimism in which the thinking needed to survive that climate change can be pursued.