3 FEBRUARY 2012 - 27 MAY 2012
Elizabeth Price creates immersive video installations incorporating digital moving image, text and music. They draw upon existing archives of film, photography and physical collections of art to invent new, apocalyptic narratives.
Each video opens by establishing a particular setting: an auditorium, a sculpture gallery or, in her newest work, a wrecked container ship at the bottom of the sea. She draws upon historical film, photographic archives and collections of artefacts to generate fantasy episodes.
Human action is rarely directly featured, and the drama is mainly expressed using objects. These stand in for humans, and are used to present institutional contexts and social histories, as well as aspirational desires.
Commodity culture and consumerism are reoccurring concerns, often explored through the singling out of specific objects that become expressions of human existence, relationships and social ideas. Alongside recent work the exhibition includes the new video West Hinder, which explores these themes through a ‘ruined cargo’ - a container-ship of new, luxury cars, corroding at the depths of the North Sea. Guiding a descent to the site of the wreck, the video combines motion graphics with a chorus of synthetic voices to reveal the lost cargo as a kind of collective will: a repressed psychic force, emanating from the deep.