British artist Nathaniel Mellors makes irreverent and absurd videos, sculptures, performances, and writings that challenge our notions of taste, morality, and intelligence. His seminal series Ourhouse (2010–) features a cast of misfit characters enacting the decline of an eccentric British family. A more recent work, The Saprophage (2012), examines the literal and metaphoric waste produced by contemporary society. Mellors’s Hammer Projects exhibition centers on his newly completed film The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview, produced in collaboration with Commonwealth Projects during a residency at the Hammer. For the last three years Mellors has been particularly interested in the sculpture and culture of the Upper Palaeolithic, which informs this new body of work.

The 35mm/HD transfer film features an interview between a naive contemporary young man (Truson, a character from Ourhouse) and an apparently real Neanderthal. The Neanderthal is cleverer than Truson and plays with him and his expectations of primitivism. The interview appears to take place in a version of the mythic “Eden” (“E-Den”), and was filmed in the historic Bronson Caves in Griffith Park. The Neanderthal has been thrown out of the caves by an organization called “The Sporgo,” which, he claims, owns the caves and controls cave art. This Edenic site functions as a metaphor for the shift between a sustainable mode of human existence (hunter-gatherer) in the Upper Paleolithic age, to the Neolithic mode of existence based on an economy of ownership which is ultimately ecologically untenable.

The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview explores the emergence of art as a marker of human consciousness and the idea that art and religion are hard-wired into the human brain. The work also plays off the formerly accepted idea that Neanderthals were not capable of making art—hence the eponymous “Sophisticated Neanderthal” character, who is cleverer than his interviewer. Hammer Projects: Nathaniel Mellors is organized by curator Ali Subotnick.

Nathaniel Mellors was born in Doncaster, England in 1974. He currently lives and works in Amsterdam & Los Angeles. He studied at the Royal College of Art, London and the Ruskin School, Oxford University. Recent solo exhibitions and performances include: Nathaniel Mellors: The Nest, Cobra Museum, Amstelveen, Netherlands (2011); Performa Biennial 2011, New York; Nathaniel Mellors: Ourhouse, ICA, London (2011); Ourhouse, De Hallen, Haarlem (2010); Volatile Dispersal, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2009); Giantbum, Stedelijk Bureau, Amsterdam (2009); The Time Surgeon, South London Gallery (2009); The Ill-Tempered Manifesto, Manifesto Marathon, Serpentine Gallery, London (2007). Mellors has also been featured in several important group exhibitions including British Art Show 7: In The Days of the Comet, touring: The Slaughterhouse, Plymouth; CCA, Glasgow; Hayward Gallery, London (2011); La Biennale di Venezia - 54th International Art Exhibition – ILLUMinations, Venice, Italy (2011); Un’Expressione Geografica, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2011); Hey, We’re Closed!, Hayward Gallery, London (2010); Contour Biennial of Video Art 2009, Mechelen, Belgium (2009); Altermodern, Tate Triennial 2009, Tate Britain, London; and Art Now, Tate Britain, London (2008). He is the recipient of the 2011 Cobra Art Prize, the Montehermoso Visual Arts Grant, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam Production Residency, ArtSway, Sway, Hampshire and the Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship.

Hammer Projects is a series of exhibitions focusing primarily on the work of emerging artists.

Hammer Projects is made possible by a major gift from The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.

Generous support is provided by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and Susan Bay Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy. Additional support is provided by Good Works Foundation and Laura Donnelley; the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles; the Decade Fund; and the David Teiger Curatorial Travel Fund.

Hammer Projects: Nathaniel Mellors is presented through a residency at the Hammer Museum.

All images: Nathaniel Mellors, Still from The Sophisticated Neanderthal Interview, 2013 , 35mm & Digital-8 HD transfer, Runtime TBD. Courtesy the artist and Matt's Gallery, London; Monitor, Rome & Galerie Diana Stigter, Amsterdam