New AV works and a live performance in collaboration with Jos McKain

OPENING RECEPTION + PERFORMANCE: March 17, 8-10PM performance begins at 8:30PM

GALLERY HOURS: March 17-21, noon-6PM

“I’d just like to point out that if anybody cares to look at the video evidence, at no point was my bare backside revealed. So therefore the fact he says he’s seen it totally negates the credence of what he said in the previous part of the answer….I’m glad I’ve got that off my chest – it’s been bothering me, that.”

The work simultaneously inhabits multiple time frames in dance music’s cultural past and present, re-contextualising them as a way of exposing their failures and flaws as well as any latent positive potential, exploring hedonism and spectacle in popular culture, and the role it plays within capitalism.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ruth Angel Edwards is a multimedia artist currently living and working in the UK. She originates from Nottingham, England, and studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in London. Her work draws from pop culture – looking at mainstream and subcultural youth movements both past and present, and within these, the ways audio and visual content are used to manipulate an audience and to disseminate information.

Most recently her work has concentrated on dance subcultures from the late 1980s into the 90s and early 2000s, and mainstream genres popular today such as EDM, Dubstep and House. She examines lyrical and sonic qualities, alongside the visual content, including graphic design, fashion and music videos, reflecting on the trajectory of dance and rave music as an illustration of the changing politics of music subcultures, both overt and concealed. Working between music, sound, moving image, sculpture, printed collage and online work, subcultural and mainstream youth cultures are referenced, appropriated and subverted, creating sensual and disorientating environments. ‘Female’ physicality (body and voice) appear as a motif within the practice. Used to imply pleasure, sensuality, freedom, spirituality, love, excess, the mass produced sexualised female body has become a visual code for hedonism. Alongside this, the work draws on and openly references ‘Techno Shamanism’, a theory pioneered by new age philosophers such as Terrence McKenna in the late 80s, most popular in the UK and Californian rave scenes. Techno Shamanism incorporated aspects of New Age and Environmentalist thinking, and predicted that electronic music, psychedelic drugs and new technologies such as the internet would be instrumental in bringing about radical changes in society, entering a new era around the dawn of the millennium in 2000. ​