Images: Jack Elliot Edwards
Holy Prototype, 15 mins approx. 2024
two-channel video installation
PAGE/STAGE/SPACE, San Mei Gallery, London
curated by Motor Dance Journal
Growing up in the 1990s I developed a kind of romantic devotion to Eurodance music, which I first encountered at the local fairground in my hometown of Loughborough where an annual fair has operated in the same market square since 1221. On its pilgrimage around Europe, the fair tours paintings in the form of illuminated signs — monumental famous female faces spray painted onto ovaluar 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 religious icon.
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 Eurodance music videos and relocated within the form of the illuminated fairground sign. Played independenly of one another, the two screens present a perpetually evolving A Capella Eurodance chorus which shifts between harmony and dissonance.