ART-PRESENTATION: Benedict Drew, The Trickle-Down Syndrome
Benedict Drew works across video, sculpture and music, creating large-scale installations which he conceives in response to major global events, commenting on the effects of socio-political and environmental issues, also Benedict Drew explores the expressions and logic of media and its imagery and operations and the intersections of the physical and digital worlds.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Whitechapel Gallery Archive
Benedict Drew’s solo exhibition “The Trickle-Down Syndrome” is a large-scale work comprised of five connected yet distinct rooms drawing on wide-ranging references, from the stage sets of classic Hollywood cinematographer Busby Berkeley to the Surrealist worlds of artist Max Ernst. Co-commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery and Art Night 2017, “The Trickle-Down Syndrome” invites viewers through a dizzying array of kaleidoscopic projections, vividly coloured video screens, experimental synthesizer compositions, hand-drawn landscapes, large-scale banners, human-shaped sculptures, a tiered stage, painted canvas tambourines and an accompanying audio narrative, all coming together to take visitors on an emotional and sensory journey. As the artist says: “The work will contain a sense of the hand made and idiosyncratic, provisional and fantastical. The feeling that I am interested in is one of the submersion from social and environmental despair, crawling through Tory slime, being overwhelmed by images, being confused by the shifting status of objects, being disoriented by history, layers and layers of history, trying to generate a state of being that can escape, and seeing escape as a potent form of resistance, ecstatic protest”. Among his previous works is the “Sequencer” (2015), Drew’s a work for British Art Show 8, where multiple projections and drum machines were accompanied by a single vocal element. Building on the concerns of Drew’s previous work, the installation explores our relationship to landscape in an age of the ‘technological sublime’. Made up of distinct parts, it borrows its title and structure from an electronic device used to store, edit and play back musical notes and beats.
Info: CuratorsEmily Butler, Mahera and Mohammad Abu Ghazaleh Curator, Assistant Curator: Candy Stobbs, Whitechapel Gallery, 77–82 Whitechapel High Street, London, Duration: 7/6-3/9/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-21:00, www.whitechapelgallery.org
