250411002 (4 Corners make a 5th Hole)
1/4 video parts completing a video totem This video is the second from top element with 250411004 and 25041103 below, and 250411001 stacked on top.
Each part is an individual work, and when all 4 parts are put together the 5th aspect is virtually created.
Video produced by James Alec Hardy in ASCii Studio, London 2025 Format: MPEG-4 Video Native size 720 x 576 Duration: 3mins 10sec (loop) 4:3 Ratio PAL
Primary mode of display: Presented on 17” CRT video monitor. Alternative versions of presentation acceptable as long as 4:3 ratio is maintained.
Description from essay accompanying exhibition essay for the launch of Ebb Spiked at Kupfer Projects, London, which opened on 11th April 2025.
Ebb Spiked: Palindromes of Practice and Purpose in The Art of Five Artists
James Alec Hardy creates environments and installations that explore several visual, technological and performative vernaculars, both in isolation and in coalition. However, the immersion he offers – as both object and experience – does not rest on the stasis or solution provided by mere hybridity. One plus one does not equal just another one in Hardy’s work. Rather, it is the very DNA of transition – materially as object; epistemologically as process – that propels his body of work. The actors of Hardy’s enigmatic stage are many of art’s usual suspects: image, film, sound, performance, installation, light. Add to that cast blockchain technology, the internet, scanners, game engines and virtual reality, and the theatre in which Hardy asks us to sit and explore the sound of time and the broken darkness of space begins to reverberate with a unique energy and curiosity, at once lively yet deadly; complex yet visceral. Hardy often begins with rather rudimentary analogue video production technology, which he then unpicks and converts digitally. Herein lies the germ of the artist’s transition and the illumination such conversion sheds on the pulse of his enterprise. The result is, oftentimes, a four-dimensional space in that it presents a stage both ambient and digital; both IRL and online; both fixed and fluid, with that space interrogating the viewer’s preconceptions about the nature of object-hood, performance and, above all else, the mechanics and dynamic of simply looking at art. In Ebb Spiked, Hardy’s untitled new work is an object made up of four cathode-ray tube video monitors stacked one on top of the other and displayed on a plinth. Each screen plays analogue video streams that have been manipulated by the artist. It is a somewhat ‘traditional’ form of display that is then very carefully and elegantly discombobulated. Hardy has a long, luxurious piece of iridescent blue fabric cascade down from the ceiling above, shrouding the displayed object with a diaphanous shimmer that physically distorts it, the video it plays and the very act of taking in the work given that the viewer is now forced to look at the screen through a tiny slit cut into the fabric. The result is an object and experience, born of obsolescence, nurtured by abstraction and which only achieves its realisation as an act of negation. Revelation resides in burial; performance tracks the trace of an object as the object of its own trace: haunting, alluring, challenging. Sound, object, installation and performance all dance together, inviting the viewer to ponder not just the physical ambience of an experience, but the simultaneity – temporal, spatial and emotional – that underpins the arc and act of seeing.
Matt Carey-Williams 6-8 April 2025 Sandy Lane, Wiltshire