LIGHT FORMS

The title LIGHT FORMS is borrowed from the generic title given to the series of small 'video-beings'. In ‘LIGHT FORM: you’re the reason our kids are ugly, Conway Twitty, 1978’, (opposite, top left) and other pieces in the same series, are a digital symbiosis of different facial features and form. Although made by merging together two faces, they are neither representative nor interpretative (of the ‘sitters’)

If they are not portraits, they do reference things mortal and the temptation to take this idea further is irresistible. As concrete objects they are real in the same way that anything else is. Their ontological status is no different to any other object; but these are more essential than a coffee cup and provoke empathy that gives them more ‘rights’ than a pencil.

Assisted into a pitiful subsistence rather than existence, they are helpless incognates, resigned to a perverse re-enactment of all they know, like an impossible metaphysical paradigm with the button stuck. Each isolated 'video being' walks a narrow path; silent and caged in their own world, they repeat their limited existence.

Established conventions and technology (use of monitors and projectors, use of rectangular flat screens etc) condition how video work is made and seen, and we are complicit. For example, we know that the projector doesn’t usually need to be noticed. In the LIGHT FORMS pieces, the projector is built into the system of each work and has a life-giving role, like a primordial ‘brain’ working inside.

In'Dva Moodges: YELLOW' and 'Dva Moodges: PINK', on the other side of the gallery,the projectors are perched overhead and directed downwards, fully visible and close to the work. The images are emptied out of the projectors and flow into containing structures of steel and perspex. They spill down the wall and pool onto the floor. In these pieces a less esoteric aesthetic rules, as the light and colour emitted is treated as a formal component.

List of works included in the show

1. LIGHT FORM:
You’re the reason our kids are ugly - Conway Twitty 1978

2. LIGHT FORM:
You’re twistin’ my melon man - Shaun Ryder 1990

3.LIGHT FORM:
And if they’re northern that makes it even worse-Morrissey 1993