Absolution in the Thunderdome: A Report on the Banality of Innocence.
L’Etat, c’est moi.
L’Etat, c’est nous.
All within the state; nothing outside the state; nothing without the state.
This series of works manifests a range of possibilities to transcend the ‘violence of definition’: through proxy bodies removed of identity, virtual animated environments, and a commingling of the abject and the sublime.
Beginning with the proposal that there is no innate state of being – no garden from which humanity fell – these works situate gabber as an interval removed from narrative. Beyond that of the non-place: towards an undefined nothing. Through unbuilding andwilding attributes fixed in coherence are laboriously smeared with a thick grease. Attention is directed to the mites/particles suspended in wrested binaries.
Pushing through a dislocation of narrative from the body, gabber bypasses the Futurist fixation with speed, and instead pursues incoherent absolution, immersed in (often homosocial) homogeneity. By this method perhaps not all difference is erased, but all definition.
Arising from an obsession with collective mesmerism through iconography, these works engage with the misrecognition of ‘uncorrupted’ juvenile platitudes, as secure absolutes, veering into regressive totalitarian milieus. The drive towards absolution and engulfing reassurance wills existence to take form through voyeuristic corpses: unembodied essence.
