Trollgladites: THEY ARE CONSUMING US

About

[...]'If we all spit together, we can drown the bastards' – Bob Crow

Its hard to write a cool, detached, organized exhibition text about a subject that aggravates my emotional state. Is a distanced cynicism always the way for these things, who even reads them anyway, they are to my mind forgettable, and purposefully so.

The amount to which I emotionally resonate with the artworks that I produce is important. I suppose talking about my emotional resonance of an artwork can be seen as woolly, unserious and wholly unfashionable within the current idolatry of the contemporary, market driven art world.

Of course this is a small symptom of a much wider malaise that the rest of contemporary society finds itself in. One of fearful individualism and fractured community, we are being slowly submerged in consumption frenzy to the point of suffocation.

Lost links to the land, to each other, to our immediate communities...this is all so fucking sad.

Now, will a set of drawings, a performance and a video change any of that? Of course not.

But these works originate from thoughtful warm intent, and they are a genuine exploration of myself, how I interact with the micro and macrocosms of human society.

I do care, and I suppose these works are a very small step in helping me to articulate and work out how to be a better part of the whole.

The monstrous incarnations that make up this small body of work at Five Years, concern themselves with the  emotional weight of the neo-liberalist project and its fall-out. There is sadness and hyper ecstasy. Prisoners of joy perhaps?

These Identities and avatars are created through the use and exploitation of the current technological moment. Anxiety, isolationism and avarice are symptoms of the antagonistic relationship with consumer capital. Further compounded and exacerbated by the proximity to hardware and software that is rendering society further into subjecthood.

There are many people for whose position is more dire, but by simply admitting you sometimes feel lost, and by becoming somewhat openly vulnerable, more honesty will ensue, and that will lead us to activate our shared commonalities. We can then hopefully rid ourselves of the constraints imposed on us in the name of freedom

Lastly I want to give warm thanks to all the members at Five Years and Mutton Fist press for continuing to run the gallery, and all your wonderful projects over the years. But special thanks to Phill Wilson-Perkin and Lisa Craddock for being ace, and  helping to run things with next to no resources, all done with boundless enthusiasm.