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Paul Rooney and Leeds United

Edinburgh College of Art
August 1st-September 1st
If ever there was a match made in northern English heaven, it's this one between Liverpool-born polymath Paul Rooney and arts collective Leeds United. While Rooney has plundered pop culture to create a series of fantastical parallel universes featuring the likes of open-top bus tours, 1960s counter-cultural icon Jeff Nuttall, and a sprite trapped in a 12” vinyl record called Lucy Over Lancashire, the pseudonymously inclined Leeds United appropriate other artists work for their own ends.

As Rooney returns to his alma mater mob-handed, he and Leeds United sniff each other out in a series of mutual homages, mythologies and make-believe histories that break cover with a project begun in 2011 that blurs the boundaries of who exactly did what. Such death-of-the-author tactics include a new video and text-based works, including a video that attempts to claim the Loch Ness monster for the Museum of Modern Art and a bleak little film about Yorkshire rhubarb sheds.

Wearing their roots on their sleeves as much as they explode them with a dark urban wit, this is the sight and sounds of the north rising again in a not so grim exchange of ideas.

The List, August 2013


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