GRAND HOTEL ABYSS

28th May - 28th June 2008
Event Night 19th June 6pm

Visible from outside the gallery's large shop front window is a darkened room. Within the room, lying across makeshift work surfaces, pinned to the walls or fallen forgotten to the floor are plans, graphs and cartographic materials relating to various indistinct urban areas. Filing cabinets, shelves, architectural models, CCTV monitors and a lone bath filled to its watermark with PVA glue are also visible. Around these objects a number of individuals busy themselves in work...

This fully functional studio is perhaps the clearest indicator of a quality of thought currently occupying the CutUp collective, a quality actualised in Grand Hotel Abyss - their third solo exhibition at SEVENTEEN. The studio mock-up, relating as it does to supposed truths constructed around CutUp's own practice as a politically charged anonymous collective, represents the most personal element in an entirely new series of process based installations through which the group critically reflect upon the fragility of inherited truth structures.
In addition to the studio, CutUp maintain their ongoing examination of spectacular culture and the mass media image though two new video installations. Static Iteration, 2008 features 16 televisions each with its own video recorder wired together and arranged on plinths in single file. Each TV/Video unit is automatically programmed to record, rewind, stop and play continuously, taking a mainstream television broadcast received by just one of the units and transferring it to each of the others in an endless chain of renewal and obliteration. Untitled, 2008 is the second video installation. Each frame in a thirty second television advert is exploded into thousands of pixel-sized elements and then re-ordered into a series of moving images, from CutUp's visual vocabulary. What was once an ordered form is obliterated, leaving a fractured, chaotic, visual flux - destruction leading to a new construction. The work is presented across nine monitors built into a scaffold super-structure. Outside the gallery a series of large billboard works will be spread across the area, relating to the maps and plans found in the studio.

The final work in the exhibition, though methodologically similar to the other installations, represents a significant conceptual departure for CutUp. In Plain Bob Major, 2008 language itself is probed, syntax and linguistic structure being subjected to examinations previously reserved by the group exclusively for the image. A predetermined sentence is programmed into a large-scale sonic sequencer hand built by the group in their Hackney Wick studio. As a participatory object, the viewer in asked to interact with the many knobs and dials that sprawl across the sequencers facia. Pre programmed and linked to speakers, the sequencer ordinarily repeats the sentence in its regular syntactical order, however with each tweak and turn the viewer effectively, but unwittingly and without obvious control, commands the sequencer to reorder the words in the sentence. In effect what was once a logical statement becomes a scattered combination of elementary words forming a new non-sensical and aleatory language structure.