London-based artist Elizabeth Price (UK, b. 1966) creates richly layered, moving image works made specifically for gallery settings. Composed of a broad range of imagery sourced from analogue and digital photography, animation, and motion graphics, her works are often accompanied by scrolling text, narrated by a computerized voice and paired with music.
Conceived in response to the architecture and past history of the Walker’s gallery, this solo exhibition features two new moving image works—FELT TIP and KOHL (both 2018)—marking the artist’s first commission for a US museum. Projected floor to ceiling at over 15 feet, FELT TIP focuses on design motifs of men’s neckties from the 1970s and ’80s with patterns that evoke electronic networks and digital systems. Exploring the tie as both a sign of professional distinction and a sexually charged object, the work weaves together narratives of early computer technologies in the workplace and the gendered distinctions of its workforce. Conceived as a ghost story, KOHL describes a vast and unseen underground liquid network that hosts mysterious apparitions called “visitants,” who hint at ways that the mining of coal has underpinned much of our present social reality. Seen together, Price’s new works take motifs of dress and body adornment to reflect upon the relationship between the material and digital, sites of labor, and markers of class.
Curator: Pavel Pyś, with Jadine Collingwood