Dylan Hope
(He/Him)
My sculptural practice attempts to instantiate a comic grotesquerie into the everyday. My installations, which are often theatrical, bawdy and vaudevillian, reimagine the gallery as a kind of object circus.
In ‘I’m working on a building (tenement)’ an assemblage of disparate parts instantiates a gothic incoherence, as doll-like figures assume personhood in the shadows of the eye’s peripherals. Like a coat hung on a bedroom door this work attempts to problematise the gaze. The eye is construed as a malcontent, acting against the mind’s own desire for visual reassurance from the nightmares and apparitions which creep out of the imagination into our surroundings. Objects become paradoxically animated and deconstructed by the gaze’s continual assertion that they are only suspicious props.
My practice acts out a mischievous ethics: a macabre comedy which aims to address the emptiness of an unstable western world and to offer a humorous, compassionate perspective through which to observe its ‘progression.’ Through my work I hope to reaffirm the potential in acknowledging that what “seems only ludicrous is sometimes very serious.”
‘I’m working on building (tenement)’
This work attempts to realise the suggestive, lurking bodies which populate the dirty corners of our imaginations and therefore our everyday realities. The work originates in an admission of our own our internal fractures and the psycho-spatial distortion incurred by a hollow, inhuman relationship to material culture. Casting an awkward shadow on the surface of the room it inhabits, it attempts to activate a strange recognition. The awkward shock of hearing your neighbour argue through a thin wall, the sound of someone (or something) tromping up communal stairways, the smell of another’s cooking; all of these quotidian moments project beyond the material boundaries of inhabited space and as such force you to remember that ‘your’ space is only an act of psycho-spatial compartmentalisation. There is a comic horror in the recognition that you and your neighbours independently occupy a single space. This is the domain of ghostly noises, smells and tensions which drift in whilst our bodies are confined by the walls of privacy. ‘I’m working on a building (tenement)’ poses a question; are our walls protection or imprisonment?
