Disc Unknown at Castlefield Gallery

Joe O’Rourke’s paintings are made from found objects and DVD cases, pulled out of one context and given another inside the work. Disc Unknown does that same move a second time, at the level of the whole show: the same body of work taken out of Pipeline in London, where it opened in June timed to London Gallery Weekend, and restaged rather than repeated for Castlefield Gallery. It’s the first exhibition to come from this new partnership between the two galleries, with O’Rourke chosen for it through an open call that drew a record number of submissions.

O’Rourke works from Bankley Studios in Levenshulme and co-runs Bankley Gallery. His paintings start with something noticed, not planned – an overheard conversation, a view from a bus window, an object the world seems to overlook. Text runs through the work as both language and image – painted words, signage, phrases lifted from advertising, repeating like a private vocabulary built from public material. The DVD-case paintings are the smallest and most domestic expression of this. The larger wall-based and freestanding works scale it up, testing whether handmade and mass-produced, intimate and public, still hold together at size.

That last question is what makes Castlefield a fitting second stop. The gallery’s street-facing windows put the work in view of anyone walking down Hewitt Street, whether they encounter it by chance or more intentionally. It’s another little flex between public and private space – or maybe public and more public space. A show about material moving between contexts ends up on a street where the city can look straight back in.