A Million Lies Once and Only Revealed After Death (Triangle of Need)

About

As part of Edinburgh Art Festival's Art Late event, we present a multi-channel video installation and performance which orchestrates exceedingly complex, abrasive and synchronised sets of ideas surrounding lies, imitation, deception, need, wealth, desire, belief, superstition and resources/means. Citing Nicolas Bourriaud's Postproduction thesis its mirrors a contemporary alignment of visual art practice with DJ practice assembling and re-deploying pre-existing materials with the arbitrary, disordered, abstract. disorientating condition of the exploiting the ‘search engine' to generate an intense narrative of collided, collage-led, editorialised extracts and references. The performance collides and synchronizes live and pre-recorded materials cued to a multi-channel video installation devised by a group of artist and performance collaborators who have worked with Alex Hetherington since November 2008. The story revolves round the correlation of four central inter-related narratives and artworks: the biography of eccentric gun heiress Sarah Winchester and the heir to her fortune and the Winchester Suite, a video installation by the artist Jeremy Blake with the falsified narratives of email scams, where a huge fortune is discovered following a violent death. The second narrative exploits and re-enacts elements of American artist Catherine Sullivan's film works The Chittendens and Triangle of Need equating their distressing, disorientating sensibilities with the progressive dismantling of the memory and identity of Alex Hetherington's mother. Alongside this are related references to the psychology and consequences of lying, the employment of disjointed chronologies, and extracts from selected correspondingly fake artworks, films, theatre and music, continuing to, at once, establish and dismantle identity and its values.