Preview: 6 September 2012, 6:30 - 8:30PM

Exhibition: 7 September – 30 September 2012

Kathy Acker & Alan Sondheim, Rachal Bradley, Nicolas Ceccaldi and Brice Dellsperger

Curated by Jamie Stevens

At the centre of Interiority Complex is The blue tape, an intense document of collaboration by Kathy Acker and Alan Sondheim in which their mutual intellectual and sexual desires are fixed into videotape. Having raised funds for the project, Sondheim invited Acker to New York to shoot this work over the course of a single day in 1974. The two artists then screened and discussed the resulting 55-minute film in art colleges across the USA.

Rachal Bradley uses a flatbed scanner as treatment table for artistic reference and personal intervention, with four large-scale prints sourced from catalogues on the work of Bridget Riley. Since the mid-1990s, Riley has chosen to deploy vectorised image files to represent her paintings in printed catalogues (as opposed to photographic documentation), a process of digital design that Bradley attempts to unravel to a further stage of production. Bradley’s Out of Season series returns these images of paint-less paintings to their signified position, hung in the gallery with their optical intensity shifted by the erosion of their authentic material and author.

Nicolas Ceccaldi’s work Et Verbum Caro Factum Est – meaning “and the verb becomes flesh” in Latin – compounds a singular diaristic monologue from the online ‘community’ at 4chan.org, a messageboard used anonymously by its users and the sandpit of many popular internet memes and online activism. The resulting narration, organised by Ceccaldi from a patchwork of posts and users, is latent with extreme narcissism and prejudice.

Since 1995, Brice Dellsperger’s major project has been his series of videos made under the collective title Body Double, in which he remakes – often shot-for-shot – sequences from mainstream cinema. Body Double 23 doubles and cuts together scenes from Brian De Palma’s ‘The Black Dahlia’, in which three screen-test sequences from the original film are woven together to create one continuous dialogue, with the audience placed into the position of a casting director. The action unfolds in black space with a lip-synced and heavily mannered performance of the film’s victim as she passes, in Dellsperger’s words, “from anonymity to celebrity, from life to death”.

Click here to read a review of The blue tape written by Chris Kraus for FEED in 2000, published here with kind permission of the author.

Interiority Complex, installation view, Cubitt Gallery, 2012. Photo: Mark Blower.

Nicolas Ceccaldi, Et Verbum Caro Factum Est II, 2012, ball point ben and paper. Photo: Mark Blower.