RICHARD DUCKER – HUM
2014-09-22The gallery space has been taken over by some form of alien presence. There is a slippage in time that is both uncertain and playful. A large photograph of a battleship from WW2, taken by the artist’s father, holds the stage, while scattered about the floor are boulders linked together by piping, as if breathing or communicating. One of the boulders is raised up menacingly on a watchtower-like structure. Within this theatrical flight of fancy is the suggestion of a primordial life support system. There is something of The Matrix here, albeit with a Flintstones’ touch.
The text is barely readable through lack of punctuation. Paranoia and unspecified surveillance permeate the spliced extracts from David Ike’s book The Biggest Secret and ‘clippings’ from the artist’s own spam box. Its Burroughs-like structure offers a glimpse into the overload of the economic, and its corollary, the conspiracy theory’s paranoiac escapism. Within its incoherence, in the absurdity of its own seriousness, there is also something tragically heroic.
At the heart of the installation is the conduit, the receiver, the prism through which time fragments, the HUM. Geometric, translucent, Modernist – it is a philosopher’s stone, contained by two speakers. The sound* is dissonant, uncertain: an electrical sub station, interference, the Mothership.
Exhibition runs through to October 12th, 2014
Angus-Hughes Gallery
26 Lower Clapton Rd
(at the junction of Urswick Rd)
London
E5 0PD
