SLEIGHT - Candida Powell-Williams

About

Sleight, an immersive installation by artist Candida Powell-Williams, invites viewers to reassess their understandings of the most essential tool of human communication: the hand gesture. As familiar body language gradually inures second meaning, the essential risks inherent of all human collaborations will become exposed. The installation will feature at least 100 white-gloved hands protruding from the stale inner walls of a huge circular drum. The real hands of performers will be interspersed alongside fake hands, moving gently and gesturing just inches away from the audience. Outside of the enclosure, the sculpted shapes of vague tools underpin the installation's themes of human competitiveness and enduring progress against the ideals of teamwork. Altered vocals on repeat further amplify miscommunication and hidden meaning within the work itself. A multifacted work of artifice, Sleight is open to the individual interpretation and experience of each viewer. It is both a wholly cohesive installation and a disjointed series of individual pieces. Similarly, it is at once a commentary on the shortcomings of Marxist ideology in today's political climate and a loose observation of enduring primitive human behaviours. On opening night, the work's spirit of chaotic collaboration and individual interpretation will be enacted by a series of performances by other artists invited by Powell-Williams to respond to the ideas latent in the work. Powell-Williams's recent work has focused on the transformation of fragile materials into prop-like objects. Combined with the reinterpretation of historical narratives, her sculptures offer absurd versions of our collective sense of reality. Following on directly from her solo show in Salisbury, Sleight is acutely interwoven with the political and social undertones throughout its immersive, creepy and dreamlike state. This represents a new direction to Powel-Williams's anarchic aesthetic.