> CARVED UP M/E · 1907–1928
> RED LINE AGREEMENT :: SIGNED
> OP. AJAX :: 1953 :: COMPLETE.
— CARTER, 1980
> C · H · A · O · S
> VISIBLE ONLY TO THOSE WHO CAN READ
ADD FILES TO /MAT/IMAGES/
There is a moment in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove when Major Kong rides a nuclear bomb out of a B-52 and into history, whooping and waving his Stetson as the world ends. It is one of cinema's great images of American exceptionalism — the cowboy sublime, the frontier spirit applied to apocalypse. Mat Consume has painted that moment, placed it on an American flag, and titled it Yeehaw (How I Learned to Stop Worrying…). The Kubrick reference is only the beginning.
Imperfect Multiples is a show about systems. About the interlocking machinery of oil, arms, money and media that has shaped the world since the early twentieth century, and about the culture — the brands, the movies, the slogans, the screens — that makes that machinery invisible. Consume's paintings work by making it visible again, layering corporate logos, military diagrams, CIA archive maps, stock market data and dollar bills into dense, halftone-saturated surfaces that refuse to let any single element dominate. Everything is connected. Everything is complicit.
The show begins where the story begins — with oil. The Seven Sisters, the original cartel of Anglo-American petroleum companies that carved up the Middle East between them in the early twentieth century, appear throughout the work as a kind of recurring cast. Shell, Exxon, Mobil, BP, Chevron, Texaco, Total — their logos cycle through the Arabian Nightmare triptych like a price list, or a family portrait. These are the founding fathers. In the Beginning Was the Oil, the show's largest and most ambitious work, makes that origin story explicit, placing a USAF Hellfire missile at the centre of a composition that runs the Cree prophecy down one side — when the last tree is cut down, the last fish eaten, and the last stream poisoned, you will realize that you cannot eat money — and the oil company logos down the other, with NATO rounds as wallpaper and a CIA text on America, oil and the Middle East sitting quietly beneath it all. The financial data at the base is not incidental. It is the fuel.
The weapons are everywhere, but they are never heroic. The Hellfire missile in We Deliver arrives with the cheerful efficiency of a courier service. The inverted Chevron of Incoming (Shall We Play a Game?) carries its WarGames launch sequence — Enable Missiles, Target Selection, Launch Order Confirmed — with the bureaucratic neutrality of a software update. The phallic certainty of American hard power is present throughout, rendered with a pop art directness that owes as much to punk collage as it does to Warhol. These are not paintings that whisper.
Nor are they paintings that lecture. The titles do the work that slogans do — As Advertised, Market Forces, Scheduled Programming, I'd Like to Buy the World — borrowing the language of consumer culture and turning it back on itself. The gap between the title and the image is where the politics live. Ceasefire (The Pause That Refreshes) puts a Coca-Cola archive slogan and a demand for peace in the same breath and lets them corrode each other. Do You Want Fries With That? (Sml) appends a fast food sizing code to a Cree prophecy about environmental destruction. The joke is not funny. That is the point.
The show ends with Almost Midnight — Kraftwerk's Hazeltine 1500 terminals running their launch sequences, the Doomsday Clock at 89 seconds to midnight, and beneath it all, in heavy halftone, the photographs taken over Hiroshima in August 1945. Consume visited Hiroshima last year. The experience is in the painting. Braille dots spelling CHAOS drift between the screens. The terminals confirm, in green phosphor text: Complete. Complete. Complete.
Throughout the work, a recurring visual motif — braille dots spelling CHAOS — operates as a kind of signature. It is legible only to those who know how to read it, invisible to everyone else. Like the glow-in-the-dark elements that surface in certain works when the lights go down, it rewards attention. These paintings have layers. They were built that way.
Imperfect Multiples is not a comfortable show. It is, however, a necessary one.
> FROME BREWERY
Since 1948, the Doomsday Clock has acted as the scientific community's symbolic warning to the world about how close we are to a global human-made catastrophe. In the decades since its inception, factors determining whether the clock is pushed forward or back include the size of the threats posed by nuclear weapons, climate breakdown, and the emergence of disruptive technologies like AI, automated weapons, and bioweapons. In January, the hand of the Clock was pushed forward by four seconds to now stand at 85 seconds to midnight — the closest we have ever been to Doomsday.
One of the leading factors in this decision is the accelerating threat of nuclear weapons — and the crumbling of international frameworks to limit them. Most critical is the expiry of an arms control treaty between the two largest nuclear powers. Between them, Russia and the US possess 90% of the world's 12,000 nuclear weapons. The New START Treaty put limits on the amount of nuclear weapons each country could deploy. While not perfect, New START was an important stepping stone towards a greater disarmament deal and was a break on an all-out arms race.
However, in 2026 we now find ourselves at the beginning of a new arms race with more runners than ever before.
There are nine nuclear weapons states: the US, Russia, China, France, Britain, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea — the last four of which are not signatories to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Of them all, only Israel does not officially acknowledge its nuclear status and this silence is hypocritically accepted by its allies like in the US and Britain.
All these countries have been modernising and growing their nuclear arsenals at enormous expense. According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), these nine spent $100 billion — that's $190,151 per minute — on nuclear weapons in 2024, an increase of 11% on the previous year. For the five countries who have signed up the NPT, such as Britain, this puts them in direct breach of their disarmament obligations under the NPT.
The growth in nuclear threats fits into a wider rearmament drive that's taking place. British military spending in 2025/26 is expected to total £62.2 billion, increasing to £73.5 billion by 2029/30. Of that, nuclear weapons spending accounts for between 20–25% of the MoD's budget. Not satisfied, there is growing pressure from some sections of the defence industry and political figures urging the government to cut welfare spending to fund yet even more hikes in military spending. Amid this growing insecurity, arms companies are making a fortune, with total military expenditure in 2025 reaching an eyewatering $2,887 billion in 2025, up 2.9% on the previous year.
This drive to war is compounding the climate crisis. According to Scientists for Global Responsibility, world militaries combined account for an estimated 6% of total greenhouse gas emissions. If it was a country, it would have the fourth largest carbon boot print after China, the US, and India.
One way to cut these emissions would be to close overseas bases. The US alone has approximately 800 overseas bases — 19 of which are in Britain. You can find one nearby in the Cotswolds, a 90-minute drive from where this exhibition is taking place, at RAF Fairford.
Since February, over 20 heavy bombers have been deployed to RAF Fairford and for a time were carrying out twice-daily bombing missions over Iran. While a fragile ceasefire remains in place at the time of writing, these B-1, B-2, and nuclear-capable B-52 aircraft remain in place poised to resume these illegal attacks on Iran, carrying out training exercises and burning fuel in the meantime.
Other British bases used to support Donald Trump's war mongering include RAF Lakenheath, where fuel intensive F-35 fighter-bombers and other war planes have transited through on their way to bases in the Middle East. There is also mounting evidence that US B61-12 nuclear bombs — which have a destructive yield three times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima — have been deployed to Lakenheath. Their presence ensures we are on the front line of any nuclear war between NATO and Russia. Such a war, according to modelling by Princeton University, would result in at least 90 million dead and injured within the first few hours.
The vast majority of the world's countries oppose nuclear weapons. And there is very strong support for all those countries that do have weapons to disarm. Now more than ever we need to halt the growing nuclear threats.
CND has long recognised that the twin existential threats facing the world today are that of nuclear war and climate breakdown. As global conflicts grow, it is fossil fuel companies, arms manufacturers, and the nuclear industry that are profiting most from the instability — with ordinary people and the environment footing the bill. CND campaigns for genuine security for all — one that puts people and planet first. By working together we can force through the change in direction we desperately need, for people and planet.
> Find out more at cnduk.org
EXHIBITION PRESS RELEASE · MAY 2026