THE THE THINGS IS (FOR 3)

Milton Keynes Gallery presents a major solo exhibition of work by a London-based artist who emerged in the early 1990s. Using sound, performance, sculpture and collage the artist experiments with language and identity to provoke unexpected contradictions and humorous outcomes, manifested in the form of installations, interventions and live events.

The artist’s practice often precipitates unexpected contradictions and humorous outcomes, playfully experimenting with language, image, form and identity. In an early piece Be Me, presented at Interim Art, London (1996), thirty-one friends and acquaintances were invited to assume the artist’s persona for the day and to exhibit the results. For Went to America and Didn’t Say a Word (1999), the artist travelled to New York, stayed overnight and returned home, without uttering a word. The sounds that surrounded the journey were recorded by mini-disc and presented as a sound work at Space in London. Interests in displacement and exploiting surprising situations are channelled into an ongoing sound performance Violin Siren (2004- present) where street noises, such as police sirens, are transcribed onto classical musical instruments.

The exhibition at Milton Keynes Gallery contains three new installations and a sculptural piece that wraps around the exterior of the building. ANOTHER ANOTHER RING OF BALLS (2010), is a row of found magazine pages pasted around the walls of a room, each page containing a circular image, arranged in order of size. WOMAN MAN MAN WOMAN WOMAN WOMAN MAN MAN GEORGE M. HESTER (2010) presents a series of pages from a book with black and white images of nudes on a light box so that the paper disappears and the back and front of the pages merge to create hermaphrodites. Other work will combine performance, sculpture, objects and installation, inviting visitors literally to leave their mark: a denim carpet wrapped around the building records the footprints of visitors as they walk through the space and a fully functioning rock band’s equipment is set up, live, and ready to play.

The exhibition displays a range of the artist’s experiments with systems, geometry, chance and the absurd. Each work opens up a space for the imagination, encouraging varying degrees of interaction and response, inviting the viewer into a playful dialogue with the artist.

A publication, conceived by the artist, contains a text by art historian Gilda Williams and an interview between the artist and Milton Keynes Gallery Director Anthony Spira.