REMOTE WORK: DIGITAL is an accompaniment to the exhibition REMOTE WORK, on display at Grundy Art Gallery from 18 May – 19 June 2021.
REMOTE WORK: DIGITAL brings together assorted digital assets and new works created by the artist feature in the exhibition: Nicola Dale, Kieran Leach, David Penny, Shy Bairns and Ciarán Wood.
For more information about REMOTE WORK please visit https://www.thegrundy.org/whats-on/single/remote-work/
Ciarán Wood
Echo in time (2021)
Colour video with sound, 17m17s
Echo in Time Bonus Disc: https://ciaran-wood.com/echo-in-time/
Ciarán Wood’s film revisits and relinks video footage from Coopers Townhouse in Liverpool originally filmed by his father, the photographer Tom Wood, in 2000. Coopers Townhouse, previously The Sefton, is situated on Cases Street in Liverpool city centre, dwarfed by the entrance to the Clayton Square shopping centre.
Until the 1960s, Cases Street lay between St. Johns Shopping Market and the old Central Station, which have since been demolished – two examples of the wholesale destruction of public squares and streets in Liverpool city centre during the 60s and 70s. In 1986, the 180,000 square foot Clayton Square Shopping Centre was built with one of its entrances coming right up to Coopers’ exterior wall on Cases Street.
The soul of the footage is a sense of familiarity, community and togetherness, and the joy of physicality and connection with a space – something absent in Britain during the Covid-19 pandemic. The continuity throughout scenes inside Coopers is the singing – with or without microphone – interweaving class, race, trade and desire, reaffirming the concept of a pub as a place that crosses social boundaries and as a refuge from the structures and systems outside of it. The ‘pub’ – and Coopers – are entry points to both Wood’s work and the oral histories in Liverpool, something embodied “unconsciously within the carpet tiles and tired patterns”. Although rooted in the specificity of Liverpool, Echo in time speaks to larger, universal concerns about community and the erasure and marginalisation of working people and spaces they inhabit.
The film features a collaboration with Tom Calderbank and Judy Mazonowicz.
Nicola Dale
Echo Chambers (2021)
Animation with sound, 4m20s
Created for ‘Remote Work’ at The Grundy, Blackpool and your phone.
Many thanks to John Unwin for the audio.
@JackWhomst
Video, 13 minutes
Courtesy of Jack [Redacted]
A series of fifteen TikToks, posted online by Jack [Redacted] between May and August 2020. TikTok is a video-sharing social networking service that is used to make a variety of short-form videos that have a duration from fifteen seconds to one minute. The social media platform made headlines in 2020 after former President Donald Trump signed orders to ban its use in the US.
Our research shows that Jack [Redacted] was highly active on TikTok during the lockdown of 2020, using the platform to document their research into paranormal topics. Utilising a mix of screen recordings, found footage and iPhone editing, the majority of these videos belong to one of two series; Weird Things I Found On Reddit and Things In Blackpool That Just Don’t Make Sense. Alongside this they also posted personal videos of pre-pandemic museum visits and tributes to the hit American science fiction television series The X-Files.
U/BlackpoolMaggie
Screen recording, 6 minutes (no sound)
Courtesy of Jack [Redacted]
Reddit is an entertainment, social networking, and news website that plays host to a network of over one million communities named ‘subreddits’. Subreddits are user created and each contain discussions on a different subject matter. These cover a variety of general interests such as news, video games, fitness, and pets, while also housing more niche and specific communities that range from the bizarrely mundane (such as r/WatchPaintDry) to the downright nefarious (r/WatchPeopleDie).
Originally created with an unfiltered speech and self-moderation policy, in more recent years Reddit has been both critiqued and praised for its removal of controversial subreddits, while still garnering criticism for the breeding ground of far-right ideologies. In the past ten years Reddit has shut down a number of conspiracy based subreddits, including r/GreatAwakening and r/PizzaGate, both of which followed QAnon adjacent theories; a subsection of theories that dominated the scene in 2020.
Our research indicates that Maggie B. created her Reddit account after being made redundant, using subreddits such as r/WhatIsThisThing to gather opinions on mysterious material found in The Grundy. Her use of r/Haunted and r/Missing411 implies that she believed the found matter to be of a supernatural persuasion.
This screen recording was created by Jack [Redacted] while making their Tiktoks about Maggie. Since the video was created, many of Maggie’s posts have been deleted.
David Penny’s Whetstone (2021) is an installation of digital and photographic works located around a collection of photographs made by the industrial photographer Walter Nurnberg (1907 – 1991). Nurnberg’s interest in creating a relationship between the human body and the machines that are the subjects of his photographs has been an ongoing interest within the project.
Whetstone (2021) consists of a series of works placed within the gallery space; a cluster of 10 cropped archival images; a series of 3D printed sculptures and a high definition digital animation.
Penny’s work exists at the meeting point between the physical and digital realms developed through his focus on an expanded approach to photography. Recent changes to how we think about touching objects, brought through the pandemic has led to an increased engagement with digital practices during lockdown. Here, the artist brings into real life, objects and images, which had previously only existed virtually, pointing to the always-shifting relationships between the body and technology.
Through the digital rendering of static objects held within the frame of the archival photographs, Penny is able to conjure them into being, animate them and give them life.