Output details

All Suffering SOON TO END!

Commissioned as a solo show for Matt’s Gallery, and funded by Matt’s Gallery, ACE and The Harpo Foundation, this thirty minute video installation/performance work shares its title with a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet - an apocalyptic tract about the coming ‘end days’. This work therefore replies or responds to an existing artefact through the production of another artefact, an experimental narrative in which the disruptive rhetoric of fundamentalist beliefs is incorporated within a methodology of disrupted representation. Thomas’ structural methods also relate to those used by ‘Bastard Pop’ musicians in response to pre-existing songs by using the pamphlet in a remix and genre-collision, using elements of familiar domestic television drama forms to disruptively combine popular and experimental film methods.

This work was reviewed in Art Review, Art Monthly, Frieze, Artvehicle, and 'Pick of the Week' in The Guardian. On the basis of this work Thomas was commissioned to stage a performance as part of the RADAR programme at Loughborough University, a solo show at OUTPOST gallery, Norwich, and a public lecture at Nottingham Trent University. The work was also shown as part of a retrospective of Thomas’ works at THE PLEASURE DOME, Toronto, funded by Canada Council for the Arts, which also included a Masterclass and lecture at Trinity Square Video, Toronto and Available Light Collective, Ottawa.