Rob Lye, Speculative Field Recordings of the Near Future
9 September - 7 October
Rob Lye is an artist and musician whose work frequently spans these practices to produce time based installations and immersive performance. Recent projects have explored acts of listening as means of discussing materiality, language and perception of time. Traces of the invisible have become a reoccurring theme within his practice, WI FI signals of the gallery become audible1, a history of gallery visitors movements become present through a ton of black volcanic sand covering the gallery floor2, a film taking a lost recording of the modernist writer BS Johnsons voice acts as an exercise in hallucination and speculation3, seemingly discarded bottles of lager in the gallery corner reveal themselves to contain the aeolian melody of a John Carpenter film . What immediately seems apparent is often encoded, scripted and deceptive. An obsessive approach to how meaning is constructed and generated has been continually explored through ‘exhibition making’ both as an artist and a curator. The recent shift towards scripted performance builds upon these experiences and has arrived at an interest in choreography, music and sculpture.
Combining sound, spoken word and sculpture, ‘From the Dorsal to the Tail‘ is a performance in multiple parts that takes a written narration of a muted screening of the BBC film ‘The Stone Tape,’ (1972) to explore ideas of perception and materiality. The performance drifts between these non-linear observations of the film, found footage and multi-channel diffusions of live music and manipulated field recording to create a hypnotic situation. The first section was presented in January 2017 as a forty minute performance in collaboration with the vocalist Ben Knight at ASC’s Bond House Project Space in South London.
For Rob Lye’s residency at Gildengate House, he explored the next chapter of the project and presented a durational performance to elaborate upon existing research into the relationship between graphology and choreography. The form of durational performance was a new territory for both the project and his practice and where he fully explored this context.
