Alistair Gentry
Werewolves
23 March - 12 May 2002
visit Alistair Gentry's website for more on Werewolves
ArtSway is pleased to present an exhibition of exciting new work by Alistair Gentry. Werewolves is a digital sound and environmental installation, and an experiment in the direct stimulation of visitor responses to art works.
The Feraliminal Lycanthropiser (recreated digitally here) is a device reputed to promote feelings of openness, urgency and pure existence in the present, and a temporary redirection or suppression of conscious thoughts. The installation incorporates various spoken texts, which operate on the threshold of decipherability. These all pertain in some way to physical or psychological transformations and include old stories and rhymes, contemporary motivational mantras and inarticulate human vocalisations. Many people still seek transformation and freedom from what they see as mundane lives.
All that has changed is that they look to technology and to 'experts' instead of to the superstitions and the witches of previous centuries. Werewolves draws parallels between the self-help and therapeutic culture of the early twenty-first century and the spells and folk medicine of the pre-industrial era.
The other two works in the show are Hypnomart Redux, a new version of an original work by Jo Magee and Alistair Gentry (digital animation, 2002) originally commissioned by Channel Four television and the Arts Council of England and Halcyon (digital animation and audio, 2002), a new work commisioned by Screen East and the Film Council with performers Ben Sutherland and Danielle Tarento.
Alistair Gentry created Werewolves during his Navvygate residency funded by the Regional Arts Lottery Programme through Southern & South East Arts.
Werewolves turns the main gallery at ArtSway into a digital sound and environmental landscape. Visitors carry Mathmos light balls through the space, while they listen to specially created sounds recreating the Feraliminal Lycanthropiser.
Hypnomart Redux plays on a single monitor while visitors are captured on the other, placing
them within the work.
Halcyon repeats the same narrative video with changing dialogue which encourage the audience
to question what they are watching and by extension our tendancy to make assumptions about the
world around us.
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