Artists' statement
Grounded in explorations of popular culture (historical and contemporary), our collaborative practice often takes the form of installations that combine video, sculpture, found object, text, photography and sound, as well as single-channel, time-based video works. The main initiative of our project(s) tends towards the re-working of the haunting spectres of cultural icons and objects - at once shining and new, yet poised to shape-shift into ruddy decay - in conjunctionwith, and usually detouring, historical or standardised genres. Within this, our work typically creates the appearance of odd juxtapositions, where objects as combined with images or texts often refuse to act in full concert with one another, yet are somehow suffused with the possibility of having many “functions” or multiple meanings and vantage points. The often-absurd nature of these juxtapositions contain their own rationality, as these incongruities eventually synthesise, forming dialogical relationships that speak of common or shared narratives.
Within this array of material, we are specifically drawn to the inevitable hierarchies imposed upon humans and materials, and the way these situations are played out in the meta-narratives of exclusion and development in western culture repeatedly, almost never changing, as we exist in a world that seems to be about progress at any cost. For us, this contradiction of “progress,” and its almost immediate ability to re-present itself as “decay,” is uncanny in its ability to address the horror of the past or present, in combination with anxiety about the future. We explore this contradiction in our work in many ways – principally through the use of consumer grade materials that are either in a certain state of decrepitude already, or on their way there directly, making images and fabricating objects that allude to the fragile state of corporeal existence in this late stage of the hyper-progress/decline phase of commodity capitalism.