Digbeth First Friday

Repeator: Material World

Cathy Wade and Laurence Price

4 September 2015, 6.30 - 9pm

Material is surface and object, an idea or information. We seek it in aspirational spaces; commercial & corporate zones in which our dreams are played back to us as advertisements and marketing campaigns, fashion, trends and current affairs. We purchase the new which in turn becomes the redundant. As citizens, we exist in a state of passive immersion with commerce and goods. The transactions we make in indoor shopping centres are continuous, forming a cycle of consumption and waste.

Outside the security of environmentally controlled luxury goods concessions, there exists an alternative version of our desires. What we wish for, but cannot afford, spills out to the local market as counterfeit goods, embossed with logos.

The shopping mall discards what it does not need. Empty bags, packaging & fast food wrappers are offered back to the city as spent gifts that layer the streets with debris, as we drift they follow, to a certain rhythm. They linger, tumbling along our paths back through the patterns of streets’, conversing scratchily with the pavement; ‘short life expectancy, degradation, persistence’ and other similar musings are whispered in the wind.

In Material World our engagement with surface, space, and commercial architecture is explored through new video & sound works made in public/private areas of shopping centres and the outer city centre. Footage has been captured on mobile phones offering a wider set of opportunities to document environments ‘unseen’ and without disruption. Using this technology we are able to utilise the high street ‘user/ consumer’ aesthetic which allows us to beam and project personal reflections in the commercial space. The work depicts what exists, it seeks to chart our immersion in the spaces we use as consumers. The ‘terial, a material, a material, a material world.

By cutting and conflating sound, text and image, Repeator focuses the practices of Cathy Wade and Laurence Price as collaborative working processes in which works are layered, revised, regurgitated and replayed. Repeator is an ongoing project through which works are generated from research, exchange, conversations & collaboration with others. Previous projects include #FoxNewsDisco for Werk and WE LIKE with Keith Dodds for BE Festival.

Repeator: Material World