Sorry, Mr Bond is dead
Sorry Mr Bond is dead is the generic title for seven videos that whilst being self contained are shown sequentially, reflecting aspects of similarity and difference. They operate as a multiplicity of fictive narratives always being extended to find acute psychological extremes.
These conditions of thought and fantasy are realised through the recognition of the impossibility of communication, particularly when, as in the case of the artist, there is a continual slippage between languages and cultural understanding. At the moment of collapse a transformation takes place between what are apparently ordinary insignificant moments: a comment, a gesture, a joke, an aside, and the emergence of an imagined fiction - a man walks slowly and deliberately into the sea, the whole scene highlighted by the intensity of a vermillion filter, or when one of the two central characters common to each of the videos embarks on a critique of the work of Bruce Nauman, he becomes banal and dysfunctional triggering the sound of a duck on a pond.
Each of the seven videos set out, through different narrative journeys, to reveal the fragility of the edge of what we take to be normal or ordinary. Momentary events shift radically out of their mundane contexts to evoke an underlying sense of anxiety, perhaps an impending madness.
performance: Brian Connoly and Ian Bond special thanks: Vinita Joseph
Exhibition:
2002 - Wait for Me. The London Institute Gallery Millbank, London
2001 - Deptford Art Festival. APT Gallery, London
