Matt Chandler

'A mind which has reached the gelatinous mildewy stage in the mortification of all healthy and courageous thought […] ghouls and idiots and insane howling.' – Henry David Thoreau

'At the very thought of “circus” a swarm of long-imprisoned desires breaks jail. Armed with beauty and demanding justice and everywhere threatening us with curiosity and spring and childhood this mob of forgotten wishes begins to storm the supposedly impregnable fortifications of our present.' – e. e. cummings

If, according to Kierkegaard, ‘anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’, the further we free ourselves of structure and time-keeping—supposedly becoming freer from social conventions—the more we are likely to unravel in the wake of our supposed liberty. Freedom is a fundamental philosophical paradox. Nestled firmly in this paradox is the conundrum posed by culture—a highly, yet lowly, possible cause for the debilitation of humanity. In the words of Norman O. Brown ‘[...]human culture is a set of projections of the repressed unconscious.’ It is in the illusory and filmy nature of consensus culture, a platform which nurtures many opposing forces, that the inside and the outside become inseparable; the outward being the manifestation of repressed desires which are detained within the unconscious mind. Culture masters a syncretic face which ties it to states of dreamlike phantasmagoria, and coupled with its judging and tempting character, makes it a worthy suspect for the ‘universal neurosis of mankind’

Taking reference from a recent period of popular British culture, synonymous with a generation now in their late twenties – with research grounded in psychology and philosophy – underpinned by personal experience and own human condition – the work is suggestive of the contradictory quality of happiness, hedonism and freedom; all of which are analysed under the debilitation procured by consensus reality. With pornographic obsession referring to dream states, the murky abyss of consciousness and the value of the psychotic episode, the room-sized installation is an amalgamation of sound, lighting, wallpaper and sculptural props, evocative of the onslaught and intensity of the ineffable experience. An all-encompassing, ‘all-at-once-ness’ subversion into wisdom, madness and folly. A delirium tremens of intoxicated hysteria. Madcap mind patter.