Fragile Existences

​

#18 was focused around Bex Ilsley’s endlessly repeating video piece titled ‘Twist the Head, There's Another Below’, composed of purple, totem-esque figures with bob haircuts, reminiscent of a Sphinx’s, reaching up to a considerably larger alien/god like creature that seems to be birthing the Sphinx like beings, which appear to be the inner, fragile being within all of us that has control over ones’ emotions and actions. Leading on from that was Henry Badrick’s fragmented video work ‘this is clay, this is chaos, this is collected’, a piece that utilises various objects from different institutions’ collections in order to craft a dialogue with a piece of text by William James concerning the different selves that are present within us all. To tie everything together, there is Peter Barnard’s distorted soundscape called ‘Variations on Silence’ which is made up of corrupted audio files which originally contained 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence. To me, Barnard becomes a digital archaeologist, endlessly digging into audio files in the hope that some relic from previous ‘broken’ sound pieces could be discovered and used. The god-like imagery and obsession with one’s own identity in Ilsley’s work coupled with the analysis of inner selves by Badrick accompanied by the use of ‘stolen’ objects from collections and the cultivation of broken audio files by Barnard, brings the various pieces together to form a coherent exhibit.

​

​​Curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight