HEAVENStrailer_road2utopia (2017) is a new video made specifically for the Arebyte’s storage.un-it programme. The video is conceived as a quasi-trailer for the exhibition THE HEAVENS, happening concurrently at Arebyte’s LASER project space in Clerkenwell.
Central to the video is the notion of the storage unit as a holding space; a place filled with parked material. ideas and pregnant with promise.
HEAVENStrailer_road2utopia is built around a collection of video works – finished and unfinished – which were worked on in the development of THE HEAVENS but which did not feature in the final installation. Elements of these videos have been cut and mixed together to form a new, specially configured work which introduces and augments the ideas presented in installation at LASER.
The video contains elements of the work You’ve Felt The Horizon Haven’t You? (2016/7); a recent work which shows footage, found online, of a journey across the South China Sea. Ireland has re-sound tracked the footage with of cosmic background radiation: an audible remnant of the big bang, an event which occurred 13.8 billion years ago.
Also featured is footage from Road2Utopia (2017), a short video which sees Jeff Koons’ iconic sculpture Rabbit (1986) moving through a landscape. Both Rabbit and the landscape do not exist; Rabbit is a 3D model and the vista with which Rabbit interacts is footage, again found online, of a procedurally generated landscape – computer generated imagery which builds algorithmically not manually. Theoretically this landscape will self generate beyond the horizon for all time and Rabbit will continue to roam, surveying its surroundings.
The film also features the song Welcome to my Dream taken from the film Road to Utopia (1946) starring Bing Crosby and Bob Hope about two vaudeville performers at the turn of the twentieth century who go to Alaska to make their fortune and along the way acquire a map to a secret gold mine.
Tom Ireland (b.1984, Blackpool, UK) lives and works in Blackpool, UK. Recent solo and group exhibitions include; THE HEAVENS (2017), arebyteLASER, London, UK (solo); The Manchester Contemporary (2016) with OBJECT/A, Manchester, UK (group); MEANS (2016), UNIT Projects, Blackpool, UK (group); The Kármán Line (2016), OBJECT/A, Manchester, UK (group); Modern History Vol. II (2015), The Atkinson, Southport, UK (group / curated by Lynda Morris); They Used to Call it the Moon (2014), BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead and BALTIC 39, Newcastle, UK (group); Strabismus: Exhibition as Cinema (2013), The Lombard Method, Birmingham and Mexico Project Space, Leeds, UK (group); But it could be a Levi’s advert, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, UK (as part of Flatfile w/Mathew Parkin); The Golden Coast, Untitled Gallery, Manchester, UK (solo); Easy Does it, David Dale Gallery, Glasgow, Aid & Abet, Cambridge, Supercollider Contemporary Art Projects, Blackpool, all UK (group / touring exhibition curated by Kevin Hunt). Ireland is represented by OBJECT / A.
Tom Ireland
tomirelandhq.org.uk
