Part of Summer 2007
Pleasure Dome is pleased to present the Canadian premiere of the videos of Luke Fowler. Video is but one component of Glasgow-based Fowler’s expansive interdisciplinary practice, which is united by an archival impulse. All of Fowler’s videos are marked by a process of uncovering and reconstituting history by constructing portraits of radical cultural figures which also trace the contemporary echoes of their ideas.
For Fowler, the widening horizon is the window expanded by the ongoing shift from the traditional cinematic experience via film to the multiplicity of forms embraced by video. This is anchored by the artist’s deployment of collage, where he uncovers narratives that would otherwise remain submerged, raising the wreckage of history to surface via the vessel of found footage.
Fowler’s What you see is where you’re at (2001) refracts the psychedelic undercurrents found in the theories of R.D. Laing and his communal Kingsley Hall experiment. The Way Out (2003), produced in collaboration with Kosten Koper, is a portrait of post-punk era musician Xentos Jones, who established alternative models to produce and disseminate his work. Fowler’s most recent video Pilgrimage from Scattered Points (2006) materializes the life of composer Cornelius Cardew through the development and dispersal of the Scratch Orchestra.
