QUICKSAND
Artereal Gallery Project Space - Sydney, Australia
2 - 27 Apr 2013
Artereal Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition QUICKSAND by London based artist Michael Pybus. Curated by Matt Glenn.
Pybus’ work is a visual pop mash up of remix and reconfiguration. His videos, prints, sculptures and arrangements- often low-fi techno creations, mine the archive of contemporary iconography, placing a framework of post conceptual and internet art around ‘bad’ television icons, Pokemon and 90’s rave. The artist’s avatars, symbols and recycled figures hint towards both the absurdities and earnestness of fanatical consumption and post market nostalgia.
For his exhibition in the Artereal project space, Pybus has produced a series of new works including an accompanying zine and a website which will hold active content for the duration of the exhibition.
In the video work Quicksand, which also shares the exhibition’s title, the artist corrupts a fragrance promotion into a hypnotic repeat where highly saturated figures are caught in an infinite loop of want and longing. Pybus’ androgynous, commercial doppelgangers regress from their original positions of commercial influence and instead take the form of the generic- stripped of individual cues and identifiers. It is in this space that the work steps into a sense of the subliminal that ‘out advertises’ the ‘advertiser’, where unremarkability draws a curiosity greater than the overt.
In other works in the exhibition, Pybus focuses more on the reconfiguration of commercial and cultural signifiers than the reconstruction given to Quicksand. In the hanging sculpture Burger Chain, and the adhesive vinyl prints Buffy X1 and Buffy X3, Pybus shrines childhood and adolescent icons with strong formal sensibility. While one could take a position of cynicism, both to the original kitsch-ness of (and early 2000’s distancing from) the burger phone or quasi ‘intellectualisation’ of the Vampire Slayer, Pybus’ treatment of these objects is far more honest. While nostalgia may well be a dirty word, Pybus’ treatment of his subjects, particularly in his use of formal constraints and presentation, bestows a dignity- an acknowledgement of the object’s (or icon’s) formative relevance within a generation, rather than a blind sentimentality.
Presented in the exhibition is the handmade zine falling pianos. Here Pybus releases a take away, collectable compilation of his own texts set amongst images of early rave street flyers provided from the online rave archive of Simon Marsh (webm8.com). Collected throughout the early 90's, the flyers prove a directory visual and aesthetic predilection. That these images were themselves originally caught in a paradox of London market/anti-market initiatives is compounded by Pybus’ editing. The result is an unsettling library of images that in their first incarnation may well have been at great odds with one another. Though in falling pianos, they are forced together as a consumable anthology, one which is at the mercy of a viewer as they pick through the pages, acting as a cultural litmus test, recognizing what elements have survived and been recycled, their aesthetic receding and re-surging, time after time into modes of contemporary consumables as we seek the ‘new’.
For the duration of the exhibition, the artist has created a QUICKSAND porthole on his website endlessversions.com. Here the exhibition will enter a second space, occupied by gif animations, remixes and six degrees of separations of the works on view at Artereal. The website, which will run for the life of the exhibition is the third in a series of sites constructed by Pybus (behind BUSYSLEEP and HEATHER) that have been born with the foreknowledge of their own demise. While obituaries of the first two sites remain, there is no active content left, just a thread of blogs and links that eventually lead to a permanent sleep.
On the 26th of February 2013 at 11:15pm, Michael Pybus posed on his Facebook wall:
HEATHER DIES THIS THURSDAY 28TH FEBRUARY. BE SURE TO ENJOY HER BEFORE SHE GOES FOREVER!
And at 12:11pm on February 27th:
If we can learn one thing through HEATHERS demise it's live every day like it's your last.