Images: Jack Elliot Edwards
Holy Prototype
two-channel video installation, 15 mins approx.
PAGE/STAGE/SPACE, San Mei Gallery, London, 2024
curated by Motor Dance Journal
Growing up in the 1990s I developed a kind of romantic devotion to Eurotrance music, which I first encountered at the local fairground in my hometown of Loughborough (which has operated in the same market square since 1221). On its pilgrimage around Europe, the fair anachronistically tours paintings -- illuminated signs depicting famous female faces spray painted onto steel tableaux, which mysteriously fold out of lorries in the night. Each year I look up at them in the way you might a familiar wayside shrine or a Byzantine icon, a form of image making believed to conjure a direct channel of communication with the divine.
Holy Prototype invokes these fantasy worlds in the form of a devotional object: a two-screen video diptych. Using video collaging techniques, the work presents female singers uprooted from Eurotrance music videos and isolated from their backing tracks, relocated within the form of the illuminated fairground sign. Played independenly of one another, the two screens present a perpetually evolving a-capella chorus, giving presence to the often anonymous women featured as voice samples in trance music.
two-channel video installation, 15 mins approx.
PAGE/STAGE/SPACE, San Mei Gallery, London, 2024
curated by Motor Dance Journal
Growing up in the 1990s I developed a kind of romantic devotion to Eurotrance music, which I first encountered at the local fairground in my hometown of Loughborough (which has operated in the same market square since 1221). On its pilgrimage around Europe, the fair anachronistically tours paintings -- illuminated signs depicting famous female faces spray painted onto steel tableaux, which mysteriously fold out of lorries in the night. Each year I look up at them in the way you might a familiar wayside shrine or a Byzantine icon, a form of image making believed to conjure a direct channel of communication with the divine.
Holy Prototype invokes these fantasy worlds in the form of a devotional object: a two-screen video diptych. Using video collaging techniques, the work presents female singers uprooted from Eurotrance music videos and isolated from their backing tracks, relocated within the form of the illuminated fairground sign. Played independenly of one another, the two screens present a perpetually evolving a-capella chorus, giving presence to the often anonymous women featured as voice samples in trance music.