Jeremy Hutchison: Monster

About

The RYDER is pleased to present a new video work by Jeremy Hutchison.                         .  

Monster examines the operations of a peanut factory in the Middle East. The employees are seen working tirelessly at their stations, performing a sequence of repetitive tasks. But while bodies and machines function in choreographed routines, the material input of their labour has been removed. There is not a peanut to be seen. The factory simply reproduces its own labour conditions.                                                                                           .  

This video explores the challenge of technological automation on human existence. As robots disrupt one industry after another, human wage labour is now sliding into obsolescence. In time, it could disappear altogether. While this post-work condition may liberate humanity from the deadening alienation of capitalism, it will carry its own existential challenges. Given the cultural hegemony of the work ethic, will we find it so easy to fill our time with more meaningful activities? In Monster a handful of workers rehearse this dilemma. Ritual, absurdity and sabotage are explored as possible modes of resistance, puncturing the dual risk of mechanic enslavement and existential futility.                             . 

Intervening in factories, shops, outsourcing platforms and marketing departments, Hutchison reflects on capitalist modes of production and their effects on human subjectivity. Each context becomes a stage, a metaphor for the production of reason. A situation is placed under tension: power relations are reversed, language is inverted, limits are accelerated or capsized. Operating at the intersection of performance, video, text and sculpture, his works are proposals for an uncertain kind of freedom.

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Jeremy Hutchison (b. 1979) lives and works in London. Having studied linguistics and written commercials for Coca-Cola he received a distinction from the Slade School of Art. Solo projects include Work the Meat, Pleasure the Dessert at SPACE London, Vestibular Dysfunction at Bikini Wax, Mexico City; Objectless Expansion at Division of Labour, Worcester; Demand and Supply at De Appel Gallerist Programme, Basel; i- at Rurart, Poitiers and Radar, Loughborough; ERRATUM® at Paradise Row, London. Group shows include Still (the) Barbarians at EVA International Biennale, Limerick; Points of Departure at ICA, London; Test Run at Modern Art Oxford; Design Beyond Production at Z33, Hasselt; A Small Hiccup at Grand Union, Birmingham; Keeping up appearances at Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden; You Are the Company You Keep at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland; Saatchi New Sensations, London. He was recently a member of the Whitney Independent Study Program, NYC.