22/10/2024
KERAN JAMES
‘Control-Alt-Delete’
7 November - 1 December
private view Thursday 7 November 6 - 9 pm
above, KERAN JAMES ‘In the room the women come and go...’ video 2024 dimensions variable
In the here and now of Keran James’ work, the ‘here’ is crucial, while the ’now’ is questionable. Keeping our footing is as difficult as when looking down at the incoming tide swirling about our toes. There’s both dislocation and dis-location as our hold on the present is shaken, while our awareness of where we are dissolves through subtle shifts of perception. True to a reimagined arte povera aesthetic, everyday tv monitors, mobile phones and screensavers centre us at the very moment that they propel us into a dizzying world.
Here, the medium is not the message. Less concerned with the mechanics of art-video than might at first appear, James’ preoccupation is with the way in which the viewed screen (whether of the cinema or television, either switched on or off, presenting or reflecting), holds or withholds a human presence. How time and space can be one with or disconnected from the viewer.
The viewer who can simultaneously be a performer within the act of viewing - in postcards that reverse the ‘sight’ as you turn them to read the text - revealing the identity of the tourist site while simultaneously cutting you off from seeing it.
What is seen and what is hidden. The past (‘it’s behind you!’) in what had been helium balloons of the coloured letters from Rimbaud’s poem ‘Voyelles’ now deflated, framed and identically reduced to bright crumpled squares, unreadable. Or videos that placed above it are literally displacing the same floor or wall they depict, the image of itself obscuring the real thing in the baldest of de-materialisations.
Toying with synaesthesia and literalism, metaphor and illusion, James’ new work offers us a seductive surface pleasure while subversively placing us in an interim, problematic space. Control-Alt-Delete… this is where we came in.
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