Heavy View - Laura Yuile

About

Working across video, performance, installation and sculpture British artist Laura Yuile’s work probes a range of concerns about contemporary lived experience.  In her sculptures and installations Yuile often employs perishable, ephemeral or domestic materials such as soap, lint, food, or dust, that operate as containers for meanings and ideas about the body, the urban and everyday.

In Heavy View Yuile has collected outdated and malfunctioning TVs. Grouped together like constellations of overlapping pop-up windows on a computer desktop, the TV’s have had their screens partially or fully pebble dashed.  This cheap architectural render is imbued with all the associations of suburbia, which Yuile employs as both a ‘white-noise’ and an urban camouflage. In doing so Yuile intends to make these salvaged objects disappear whilst simultaneously amplifying their ‘object-ness’ - giving them a renewed chance to exist as something else.  

On the covered screens Yuile presents a new film in which mannequins are given voice overs, acting out a script of failed and fragmented conversations between themselves, the artist and pedestrians on the street.  

Perpetually facing outwards, the mannequins are observant yet disconnected.  Standing motionless and trapped in their role as observer behind a screen,  the mannequins are the idealised versions of a human body - their hollow plastic shells mirroring that of the plastic carcasses of the broken TV’s.

Alongside the installation Yuile presents Asset Arrest, an ongoing series of weekly radio broadcasts in which she records her experiences of posing as a potential buyer of luxury apartments. Available to listen online at TACO.org and RTM.FM , the recordings will also be played in the gallery.

Heavy View has developed out of Yuile’s consideration of technological and architectural obsolescence; the failed utopia of modernist social housing  and the rapid waste generated by unfashionable or unrepairable devices. As part of the exhibition Yuile and TACO! have devised a series of events that expand upon a range of ideas that are explored within her work. More details to be announced. A small artist publication accompanies the exhibition.

Heavy View  has been made possible by the generous support of The Elephant Trust, Arts Council England and Peabody.