It’s not often you’re given a glossary to help you understand an exhibition – but young Belgian-American artist Cécile B Evans isn’t going for easy or direct. Her work here – her first proper solo show – is filled with countless complicated layers and endless obscure cultural references. But don’t run away! It sounds horrifyingly annoying (and it is a little) but it’s good. Really good.
The room has a handful of sculptures – a pair of disembodied arms reaching out from a clear Perspex sheet, an upturned wooden chair – some framed digital images and a large rug, strewn with print-outs, in front of a TV screen showing a film called ‘Hyperlinks or It Didn’t Happen’.
A poorly rendered CGI version of Philip Seymour Hoffman – ‘PHIL’ – is the star of the movie. He interviews a spambot about its relationship with an app-based celebrity, talks about a YouTube sensation who suffers from crippling agoraphobia, and discusses his own post-death existence as a bad bit of programming. There are other voices – an invisible woman, a man describing how his lover is communicating with him from beyond the grave via Facebook, a hologram dancing to ‘Forever Young’.
That hologram appears again on the walls of the gallery in adverts for beauty products. But the ads are real, they actually appeared in magazines, and the beauty product itself sits on a pedestal. It’s a fictional character marketing something in the real world, bursting out of the computer into your life.
So yes, it’s clever, complicated, heavily layered and filled with masked meanings – but that’s the point, that’s how we live – with a multiplicity of hidden personalities. There’s the friendly Facebook you, the witty Twitter you, the nasty forum you, etc etc. In each of us, there are now thousands of personas. Evans’s art may seem obtuse and difficult but she’s talking about how we live, right now. Like PHIL says at the start of the film, ‘It’s about all of us’. And that, in the end, is what good art is meant to be.
Eddy Frankel