Emily Wardill
Bassness
Description
… we had made the very first release from Underground Resistance which was a vocal track called “Your time is up”.
I took it home to my mother because i wanted her to see why we were staying up so late at night and she listened to it and she said:
“It’s nice… but it needs more bass.”
– Derrick May
Beginning from the future and looking back to 2007, Bassness listens with it’s body to the bass notes and lets them vibrate up her trouser leg.
«Night for Day» constructs a fake mother/son relationship to imagine what would happen if a communist utopian gave birth to a techno utopian and is installed as it was always intended to be shown – in a room divided into 2 by a black carpet as though it were a sandpit of half black and half white sand. Everything seems to be a stand in for the finished thing. The walls are painted in a black that wants to separate into three primary colors and images in the film come in 3s.
«Misremembered Bonesshows» the beginnings of a work inspired by an enormous imagined human washed up on the shores of the Atlantic and mis remembered by the photographer Luighi Ghirri as a whale. This mis remembered skeleton serves as the starting point to think about bodies and their remnants in contrast to our own attempts to appear whole and discrete through endless self portrait photography.
«The Pips» is a work from 2010, shot on 16mm film to talk to that imagined parentage of structuralist/materialist film makers who demanded that film never be illusory. Transferred onto digital , the body of the gymnast Francesca Jones defies any material rules – firstly by swirling her own ribbon of film around as though it were a three dimensional drawing and finally by breaking down herself into body parts.
«Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck» (2007) takes the cartoons of stained glass as an early device to communicate with a largely illiterate medieval public as a way to think about drama as a means to make messages stick in our heads. Made as a companion piece to the work «SEA OAK» – which looked at the use of metaphor in political rhetoric – «Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck» re-animates these old allegories by shining light through film.