Steven Claydon, Culture and Matter

LUX Scotland presents a screening of work by artist Steven Claydon to coincide with his current exhibitions at The Common Guild and Mount Stuart Trust. Unfolding a set of ongoing concerns explored across both exhibitions, this selection of films pushes and pulls at the rupture between the elemental materiality of things and the shifting values, histories and meanings that we assign to them. The programme will include Claydon’s recent commission for Art Sheffield 2016, Infra-idol Assembly (2016), and will be followed by a Q&A with the artist.

Reminiscent of a music video and using found footage from the internet, this work is an early example of the artist’s use of video synthesizers.

Collaging together found material from an Apple iPhone promotional video, footage from historic re-enactments and veiled references to Martin Heidegger as represented by the motif of the Smurf, this video takes a closer look at one of the artist’s primary interests – man’s relationship with technology.

Focusing on the concept of the prop, this work splices together filmed and found footage and uses analogue video synthesizers to distort a monolog narrative. Mimicry Systems was commissioned by the ICA for Channel 4’s Random Acts series.

Using a mix of archival footage and computer generated imagery, Grid & Spike interrogates the relationship between history and the contemporary. Also commissioned by the ICA for Channel 4’s Random Acts series, the work utilises an intervention into mainstream television as an opportunity to examine themes of repetition and duplicity.

Sampling footage from an IBM stop-frame animation A Boy and his Atom, this work features a stick figure composed of individual atoms and draws on Claydon’s research into the material reality of the world at an atomic level. The video is accompanied by audio samples of the atoms being moved and sporadic voices generated by early IBM computer poetry. Infra-idol Assembly was commissioned for Art Sheffield 2016 and originally presented as an audio-visual installation within Sheffield’s Moore Street electricity substation, in which the audio sequence was mixed and amplified through a sculptural plate reverb unit.