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VEX: A video installation.

An interdisciplinary performance in collaboration with graphic designer Alan Summers and visual artist Dinu Li who obtained the commission for the Tatton Park Biennial 2012, under the banner title Flights of Fancy. The work investigated the integration of performance within sculpture, particularly exploring notions of layering the performance and script in line with the conceptual notions proposed by Li. The research question involved Brechtian alienation, denying empathy by juxtaposing the same libertarian text using different personas. The aim was to appear to present filmic realism (with specific reference to real and fictional characters) but deny illusionist meaning making – as Susan Best puts it, to ‘hold in tension contrasting positions, demanding that the audience thinks about such tensions as well as feels them’ (Best: 238).

Thus the performance involved a pastiche of revolutionary figures, two real and one fictional, who have become icons of revolution through their depiction in photography and film. The depiction of three characters formed a final edit culled from nine performances where the characters are intercut. This editorial layering was an attempt to throw attention onto the incompatibility of revolution with the deconstruction, indicative of a postmodernist stance, which is presented. On a literal level the characters are either distracted from the revolution they urge or literally resolve into another deflected character.

VEX showed at Tatton Park from May to November 2012 and its surreal playfulness attracted critical and popular attention, for example coverage in the Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2148138/Meet-flying-saucer-Family-enjoys-picnic-crashed-spaceship-dont-worry-art.html.

Best, S. (2012). Against Identification: Gerard Byrne's Brechtian Tendencies. Australian & New Zealand Journal Of Art, 12(1), 224-241.