Word in Transit turned out really well! We also felt as if we were the teachers on a school trip giving out everyone’s pass as they got onto the train. The feedback we got from people who read the book thought it was a effective way of interacting without actually doing a performance. Plus, since the story has a fairly tragic ending it was strange seeing people expect a kids story to be an off-into-the-sun-set sort of story and not receiving it. A classic ‘don’t trust a book by it’s cover’ situation.
We’ve been thinking more about the how to display audition tape work. Obviously it’s a film and therefore it must exist on some kind of screen – projector, laptop, monitor. But it seems as if this should be more of a conscious decision; if someone asks ‘why is this on a monitor?’ and we can’t answer it then that feels like a problem… Maybe something appropriate will reveal its head once it’s actually made. Deciding on how to display something before it exists is fairly nonsensical.
We attended a lecture by Hilary Lloyd which we were fairly excited about since we feel her video works are small celebrations of what is perhaps beautiful in the everyday. It started off well, introducing that it wasn’t going to be a talk about her work but a more ‘in conventional’ style talk. There was also an hour long slide show that was playing behind Alex Shady and Hilary Lloyd while they were talking which was sometimes images of her work and then sometimes more inspirational images. There was a funny joke that came up half way through ‘Why doesn’t artist look out the window in the morning? Because what would they do in the afternoon’. This came in the bigger discussion of the notion of ‘the studio’ – something which perhaps came up due to the Tate Exchange theme that Alex Shady also set. They both spoke about a fairly romanticised idea of studio; things like no Wi-Fi? Seemed like an old idea of “paradise”. We more view the studio as a work place but perhaps that’s because these people have other jobs as well as being artists.
It was the opening of Alfie Strong’s solo show at Virtrine Gallery titled ‘Beyond the Pylon of the Pit’ which is taken from the fifth chapter of the abstract work ‘Nightside of Eden’. What’s on show is a series of large silk tapestries in muted greens, purples and greys. These hang alongside Aran knit fisherman jumpers and papier machache structures. It produces this over-theatrical, paranoid, unhinged display; Observed as a non-authoritative and sensory, sequentially dispersed narrative. He extracts areas of mythology, magic and folklore, combining them with things that are current cultural problems – such as government failures, raising water levels, capitalist acceleration, marginalisation of minority groups, nuclear unrest, oppression of the disadvantaged. Fairly repetitive at a glance but once learning more about the collection of imagery it felt successfully consistent.
