HUM ANGUS-HUGHES

HUM, 2014

For HUM, the gallery space appears to have been taken over by some form of alien presence. There is a slippage in time that is both uncertain and playful. A large photograph of a battleship from WW2 holds the stage, while scattered about the floor are boulders linked together by piping, as if breathing or communicating. One of the boulders is raised up menacingly on a watchtower-like structure. Within this theatrical flight of fancy is the suggestion of a primordial life support system. There is something of The Matrix here, albeit with a Flintstones’ touch. The wall text, This Nightmarish Hum, is barely readable through lack of punctuation. Paranoia and unspecified surveillance permeate the spliced extracts from David Icke’s book The Biggest Secret and ‘clippings’ from the artist’s own spam box. At the entrance of the installation is the conduit, HUM (sound-piece), the receiver, and the prism through which time fragments. Geometric, translucent, Modernist, contained by two speakers, like a stage set, the sound is a low, monotonous 50Hz.

It is this out of time nostalgia that fascinates: the implications of the specific collide with a past that is constructed by history, television, and cinema. These elastic narratives within the autobiographical, of adopted memories and constructed myths, are locked into a spectacle of theatrical interplay. The sculptural object as staged prop, the linguistic deficit, and the curatorial directive of the private, all contribute to this brackish movement of history as fiction, making it both unstable and imprecise. With both recall and invention having its effect, it is the sense of ‘wrong place, wrong time', or in Giorgio Agamben’s phrase: ‘Out of joint-ness’, that prevails.