Lewis Baxter
Lewis Baxter works primarily with moving-image and sound within sculptural installations. His works explore our relationship with emerging technologies and commercial conventions, with reference to their facilitation of interpersonal mythologies. Through a curated assortment of footage and audio they aim to depict the disparity between the posturing of media and the immovable minutiae of the everyday. By reframing tropes and gestures outside of their interdependency the work brings to question conventional forms and the aesthetic sympathies that support them.
The sound and moving-image elements also explore the endless variability of digital production and reproduction without assigning value to appearance, engaging the happy accidents of casual interface with consumer technology to speak directly about their making and act as unintentional performances, framed by their placement among other references. The reality inferred by these digital artefacts is distant and disembodied, however, remaining evocative by an attachment to the mundanity and traditions of a haunted present. It is the encumbering social reality of the past that demands more from contemporary means of production, as well as illustrating the potential for absurdity in our already precarious attachment to the digital.
The gestural interplay of collage is extended from sound and video mulch to the clarity of industrial process manifest in overconfident objects, generally exhibiting misuse of such processes as a precursor to possibility. Through emulation and synthesised fancy a friction between elements and their roles is poised to encourage a departure from continuity reliant modes of understanding, while the provisional nature of these compositions looks at a removal of creative pretence as the decontamination of materials and gestures.