tv moore, alex kershaw, shay launder, the kingpins, astrid speilman, andrew liversidge, shaun gladwell
Serial 7's was an exhibition of seven short videos. A single projection looped the individual works into a montage of reality bytes that alternated between the sleek aesthetics of advertising and the amateur style of porn videos. The hit and miss 'piss-take' that emerged from some of the works in Serial l 's, played on its simulated referent, as the compilation doubled over in convulsive mimicry of the film Series 7(2001). Each work ran for approximately four minutes and was sequenced to read like prime time viewing, complete with adbreaks. And yet the cinematic staging of the works complicated this commercial reading. Facing the images' larger than life scale, the familiar act of watching television was transformed into a self-conscious performance of viewing.
The street kid, featured in TV Moore's Untitled work, relayed anecdotes of adolescent ridicule and violence with deadpan urgency and claustrophobic intimacy-he was aloof, yet needy. With his back to a wall of graffiti, the hooded tough's confessions of mundane domestic traumas were filmed in a series of single shot perspectives. Scattered throughout the video compilation, these confessional mug shots of teenage angst parodically winked at the up-close and personal style of 'Reality TV' and its self-conscious narration. The mug shot reappeared in Alex Kershaw's Pencil as Repository, as the sitter, or 'artistic type', performed the cliched gestures of a pensive artist searching for inspiration in the body of a pencil. Played out against a monotone background, the miseen-scene was reminiscent of the cool photographic style of Thomas Ruff. The myth of the genius came to its logical end as the performer finally ate the pencil. Meaning came to rest inside the body in an imploding of the Pollock brushstroke