David Blandy

The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim

27 April 2009 - 19 July 2009

David Blandy’s work deals with his problematic relationship with popular culture, integrating fantasy adventures with real life in a search for his cultural position in the world. His video performance work The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim documents a journey of discovery. The Pilgrim, is a lone character wearing the orange robes of a Buddhist Shaolin Monk and carrying a portable record player. In his episodic adventure he is searching for ‘soul’, as a hermit in an 18th Century Park in Surrey, on an American road trip, journeying through the Lake District and the city of London.

Footage of the artist as The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim is edited with appropriated excerpts from films such as Shogun Assassin and Princess Mononoke and television programmes Kung Fu and Monkey. Revealing cultural confusion and questioning myth, custom and symbolism Blandy’s work asks about the construction of identity in a mass-media context.

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