"work scrutinises the effect and intent of mediated images, synthesised voice and the fractured narrative of instructional speech.......This immersive exhibition attempts to make sculptural the absurdity of a life spent staring into a screen and the social anxiety induced by ‘smart’ objects via an alternative sci-fi stage set comprising of a landscape of objects, sound and projection" [http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/drew/exhibition-2.php]It was a two room installation, connected by a short passage which had been draped with silver plastic sheeting to give the effect of a tunnel. The first room required that you put on a set of headphones and faced a large flatscreen TV set into the wall. This played a looped film which combined close-up images of various materials, [I think some very fat or wax, and a fibrous carpet], colour bars spreading across the screen, slowly pooling liquids and disembodied limbs. The images were intercut with text messages, either placed on top of the projected image, or standing alone in a colour field. The words asked us to question our reality. Meanwhile, the viewer is caught in the midst of a complex soundscape. The score from the video piece in the second room, was audible in the first, while a complex mix of sounds was played directly into the viewer's ear through the headphones needed for the first room. Whether this was a deliberate intention, to have the two sound arenas coinciding like this, or just an inevitable consequence of the work being shown in a small gallery is not known, but the overall effect, of being able to tune between the two soundscapes was interesting.
The second room had two further video installations, both projected on screens on top of large wooden tables, underneath which were smaller monitors playing looped films of, [I assume], the artist assembling some of the electronic circuitry he uses in creating his work. Below is the promotional video for the show, [which doesn't appear to be loading, so I have linked to it below], and two images released by the artist in conjunction with the show. The second one, Headroom 2014, is the main image used in the second of the two video installations which were shown in second room at Matt's Gallery.
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| No Body, 2014, Benedict Drew |
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| Headroom, 2014, Benedict Drew
This show was really informative and
useful for my practice, because I have only just recently made the leap
across to using time-based media for my work. As I wrote for the degree
show catalogue entry, I truly due feel that animation has allowed my
work to reach another level, since the body is not a static object, [at
least not in life anyway], and animation grants those who work with it
abilities unavailable in painting. At the very beginning of this blog, I
examined an interview with Francis Bacon, where he discussed the
question of violence within his paintings, and I said that this also was
a central issue for me, to find the means to imbue my work with an
atmosphere of menace and violence, without merely manufacturing crude
reproductions of images of violence. I believe that time-based media
offers a a far greater ability to achieve these ends than the canvas, or
at very least it has different options and possibilities, which at this
particular moment suit the ends which I am trying to achieve far more
than painting, hence my decision to use only time-based media and
Photoshop collage to achieve the goals of this current project.
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