Studio work generates litter, things that leak off the edges, things generated to make other things—detritus and ephemera. The video Living in the Radiant Cold (2022) comes out of a kind of anthology of video experiments from the last few years. Things I hadn’t been able to finish or that came out of the redigestion of recent work. I worked with the vocal harmony group “Vocal Juice” on sung parts. Improvising to samples I had gathered for the piece, we made hours and hours of material that I could then cut up back into the soundtrack.
An endoscope records and compiles domestic still lifes, detritus, and civic sewage systems. Plumbers kit. The house as a body. Objects and subjects, bodies and images only solidify for a moment before smearing
their borders, drifting into something else.
Pretty central to the work is a series of images from the archive of Horst Ademeit, whose obsessive, multi- decade project was to register the detrimental impact of “cold” rays on his body and his surroundings. Here the digital literally enacts a kind of ray or dissolve on the images.
Internal Litter as emotional category. Resentments, fears, regrets, habitual reactions to be sifted through, cleared, released.
Internal Litter is also the title of an LP by the UK queer Glam / punk band, Wild Daughter. They separated by the time of the release earlier this year.
The show enacts a kind of posthumous launch. And a chance to bring together the band’s merchandise and ephemera. The idea was to position the front room of Isabella’s gallery as merch table. But in the end the room feels like a set for a film about an afterhours party. On the floor there’s a monitor showing the first sketches for a music video I was making for their song “Leckerman,” as well as some of James’ costumes from live performances.
The metal display boards are an idea borrowed from the poster displays you see on the U-Bahn platforms around the city. The displays here pose as a kind of inventory of the research materials and test prints that accumulate when working on books.
Less a work more an anonymous, neurotic garnish. The floor sculpture Untitled (Self-Diagnosis Kits and Medical Devices) was made originally as a kind of decoration or accompaniment to SPEED, a show I was working on at the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart. The show had been feeling to rigid, and ended something a bit harder to place / with more ambiguous provenance. Thermometers, swabs, cold packs, cables, sensor mats and rubber tubing, self-diagnosis kits for HIV or syphilis, personal stress monitors, drug consumption tests, and Ziploc bags packed with assorted medical paraphernalia. The compulsive hoarder’s hypochondria;
the search for diagnosis; the fear of diagnosis.
The desire to make visible something present but unseen, to look beneath the body’s surface. Internal litter, qualities of life.
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