Jennet Thomas's Multi-Faceted Show Unspeakable Freedom >> Tastes Like Chicken Launches Sep
From 23rd September – 21st October 2016, Block 336 will show a major installation by Jennet Thomas, featuring her magnum opus The Unspeakable Freedom Device as well as Animal Condensed >> Animal Expanded , the first in a trilogy of new works exploring the meaning of animals in a post-digital and post-anthropological world.
‘The World is Completely Alive! Or the World is Completely Dead!’ written by Tom Groves is a response to the new work produced by Thomas. This is followed by information about The Unspeakable Freedom Device which will be exhibited as a full scale installation.
Part 1 of Thomas’ upcoming trilogy Animal Condensed >> Animal Expanded stages a bite-sized philosophical encounter between what are best described as two post-anthropological agents who, in an attempt to reconcile themselves with the trauma of a mass biotechnoviolation, quiz one another on the origins and ontologies of their species.
Echoing the paranoid dialectics of the fearmongering Chicken Licken, (the feathery hysteric made popular in the well-known Ladybird book of the same name) the jumbled language of Thomas’ protagonist too masks an existential truth. But unlike Chicken Licken who fears the worst before suffering a killing more cruel, Thomas’ red-footed friend has already fallen foul to a fate worse than death – not departed, perished or expired, but ‘condensed, expanded, extended and unbranded’. She is what Thomas describes as the ‘poster-girl of the industrially ambiguously animal-ish product’, something surfed and turfed out of the greedy anus of our new farming revolution.
The chicken’s interlocutor is a member of the ‘Expanded’ field, an oddball Authenticity Fetish with a peculiar aesthetic charm. Handmade, home-grown and seemingly always on the cusp of delivering up words of life-changing insight, this ropey ‘hope-puppet’ in fact struggles to articulate anything at all. As he converses with the Chicken, it is relatively clear that whilst his heart is in the right place, he is a bit mixed up with other kinds of messages possibly culled from a badly constructed Google search.
Characteristic of much of her recent work, digital and material processes have been interwoven throughout this, the first of a series of new films that Thomas plans to produce over the next three years. We are somewhere between the virtual and the actual here, a place where real objects have been sweet-talked into rendering up digital outcomes, and computer effects are dumbed down and exposed for what they really are. Thomas’ use of the photogrammetry 3d model generation process that intelligently sculpts an approximate distance between figure and ground here results is a sticky visual matter where chicken and henhouse jostle for significance.
At some point during their metaphysical chat, the Authenticity Fetish gives up trying to answer the bird’s insistent questions and pulls from his mouth a sequence of unearthly things before portentously dropping them on the floor: a human thighbone, on which is inscribed the words “Don’t wish for it, work for it”; then a toothy jaw, with “If you see something unusual, report it”. Lastly out comes a rubber Trump mask, and as if ironising the faux-illusions of her own practice, we are forewarned that “Complexity is fraud”. These coded nuggets of wisdom hatched in Thomas’ brave new world are of course frighteningly familiar. Positive thinking, paranoia and boorish idiocy are after all the meat of our times, but in her hands such Capital Speak feels somehow more ambiguous, uncertain and flighty.
Following her formidable The Unspeakable Freedom Device commissioned by Grundy Art Gallery in 2015, Animal Condensed >> Animal Expanded confronts our anxieties around transspecies existence and the formulation of farmed subjectivities and stresses the fact that whilst ‘animals as we know them, no longer exist’, our visual culture is struggling to catch up with what today’s life on earth is really like. Far from didactic, Thomas’ approach is characteristically oblique, anarchic and playful. Through the collision of meanings and ‘anti-meanings’, Thomas’ method constructs a mirror that candidly reflects our unstable and open-ended selves.
Previewing alongside The Unspeakable Freedom Device at South London’s superb artist-run gallery space Block 336, Animal Condensed >> Animal Expanded paints a corn-fed smile on the faceless head of the primate world. Set in a virtual black and white realm where human and nonhuman identities are anything but, the overriding question here is less one of animal rights and more of how our new animal ‘wrongs’ might think, feel and communicate. Neither ‘toys’, nor ‘food’, Thomas’ ‘animal-unreliables’ speak to one another in a language borne on the wings of today’s eco-hypocrisy, and the fact that we can understand them almost perfectly, only makes what they have to say all the more troubling.
Originally commissioned by Grundy Art Gallery in 2015, The Unspeakable Freedom Device combined a number of interconnected multimedia and sculptural elements and paints a picture of an absurd primitive-future world populated by a cast of uncannily familiar characters.
Margaret Thatcher is the spectral protagonist in this dystopian folkloric work; she exists as an all-pervasive image burnt onto the collective memory of a culture that is sinister and psychedelic, ‘savage’ and ritualistic. The characters are released, and we follow two impoverished pilgrims, Glenda and Mary, through a red, green and blue broken landscape. Signs have collapsed and meaning has imploded: Mary needs to find a cure for her baby; Glenda wants to help, but appears to have another agenda. Their profound disorientation leaves them unsure of which route to choose. Red, blue, or green? All roads seem to lead to Blupool. There the device is to be renewed, and the fateful implosion occurs.
The colours rotate, the fiction loops, and the pilgrims must start their search again.
A book, also titled The Unspeakable Freedom Device published by Book Works, 2015 will be available to buy from Block 336 for the duration of the Unspeakable Freedom >> Tastes Like Chicken and is available to buy online here. For the trailer of The Unspeakable Freedom Device please see here and for more information about the film and related talks and events that have taken place please see the artist’s website. Jennet Thomas is an artist based in London, whose primary medium is experimental narrative video, driven by a writing practice that sometimes manifests as performed monologues. Recent solo exhibitions include Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Matt’s Gallery, OUTPOST, PEER.
Jennet Thomas is currently Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Wimbledon College of Art, University of the Arts, London.
Unspeakable Freedom >> Tastes Like Chicken Jennet Thomas
336 Brixton Road
London
SW9 7AA
www.block336.com
Private view: 23.9.16 | 6 – 10 pm Exhibition: 24.9.16 – 21.10.16 Opening hours: Thurs – Sat or by apt. Performance evening: 7.10.16 | 6:30 – 8:30pm In conversation event: 12.10.16 | 6:30 – 8:30pm
