This Changes Nothing, Anachron-Gen
7 - 22 January 2006
2006 at Bloc begins with an exhibition of low-tech art. For This Changes Nothing, Anachron-Gen - Matt Lewis, Gemma Luz, Sean Williams and Stuart Silver (of comic duo Noble & Silver fame) - will be presenting a selection of ‘little art’ ideas in a range of media.
The title of the exhibition refers to the immediate and chilling quote made by Elvis Presley’s manager Colonel Tom Parker on hearing the news of his client’s demise. A thread of obscure rock’n’roll references runs throughout the exhibition – which the artists describe as self-indulgence rather than conceptual glue. The principal focus of show is a series of 40 inkjet prints taken from relatively low-tech sources – mobile phone photographs, stills from films made on cheap digital cameras, and stills from a web-cam.
Attempts at producing moving versions of these photographs have resulted in a series of very short films which are displayed alongside the photographs. A home-made artists’ booklet, in which they have invited artists (including musician Karl Hide of the band Underworld) and curators to respond to one of these 40 images in the form of a 100 word text, is also presented for the first time. Anachron-Gen have also created a new work entitled In Every Dream House that will be exhibited outside the main exhibition space.
One of the group’s images has been pixelated and transcribed onto the billboard on the side of Bloc Space gallery in the form of 820 squares of painted board - a hybrid of Rosenquist and Close. The artists say of the exhibition as a whole: “The viewer is not looking at anything overtly symbolic that sheds any great light on the human condition, but they are curious or mundane or whimsical. Anachron-Gen do not think there is anything wrong with being unspectacular, and making good pictures.”
