Plan A
Text installation
Ruskin Gallery, Anglia Ruskin University, East Road, Cambridge CB1 1PT
My practice involves bringing together a wide variety of processes: wall text, video, sound, sculpture, photography and painting, and juxtaposing these discrete elements to suggest narratives and explore multiple positions. As such, my work, at least in the form of exhibition display, is a form of curating as theatre. In this context, language is not to be trusted and is revealed to be disjunctive, atomized, both through its source material and its system of appropriation. The wall text is Dyslexic, alien, with malignant intent, stuck in the throat, up to no good. It is derived from spliced extracts of the writings of cults, and ‘clippings’ from my own spam box and Facebook feed. Barely readable through lack of punctuation, it offers a glimpse into the overload of a repressed economy, the collapse of privacy, and its corollary, the conspiracy theory’s paranoiac escapism. Unspecified surveillance of the personal permeates.
These elastic narratives within the autobiographical, of adopted memories and constructed myths ,are locked into a spectacle of theatrical interplay: a brackish movement of history as fiction, rendering the present unstable and imprecise. With recall and displacement having their effect, it is the sense of ‘wrong place, wrong time’ that prevails.
About ALL Art Language Location (ALL) is an art festival taking place from 13 – 29 October 2016 in locations throughout Cambridge, featuring innovative and experimental contemporary artists from across the UK and beyond who use text in their work.
ALL2016 will feature an extended exhibition of art around Cambridge and a day of performances, discussions and events to accompany the exhibition and bring together artists and audiences.
Each artist must find an appropriate venue for their work: the resulting intervention creates a conversation between artist, artwork and location. This extended exhibition aims to punctuate the city with a series of visually exciting and unexpected encounters in which our everyday interactions with text can be explored and challenged.
https://artlanguagelocation.org/richard-ducker/