GATESHEAD.- BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art presents a major new commission by Heather Phillipson (b. 1978, London). Responding to BALTIC’s vast Level 4 gallery, The Age of Love comprises video, sound and objects, evoking alternate worlds and temporalities. Somewhere between an agricultural vista and a lunar wasteland, the gallery is punctuated by functioning farm equipment, holding pens, sequenced lighting and screens, vocal warm-ups, rave era undertones and the noise of circling gulls.
Phillipson works across sculpture, video, music, online media, drawing, and poetry. For this commission, her work shifts away from what she calls her “increasingly apocalyptic undertones” towards “affirmative ways of conceiving and defying”. Animatronic dog hair, augmented reality bird faeces, birds’ eye views, mobile sculptures and a leftover foot like a knock-off archeological relic allude to what might exist beyond the rigidly anthropocentric. The Age of Love suggests alternative forms of coupling, gendering, intimacy and duration, and consigns linearity to junk.
For this exhibition, Phillipson proposes a site in which there is little to differentiate between what’s here and what’s gone, between textures underfoot, a grain silo and interstellar blast-off, between banality and wonder, and between animal noises and vocal riffs, sung from an ecstatic brain. In The Age of Love, everything is contingent, already squandered and about to happen.
Heather Phillipson works across video, sculpture, online media, music, drawing, poetry and installation. Her forthcoming projects include the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, in 2020, a new commission for the Sharjah Biennial 2019, and a new online commission for Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2018. Recent solo projects include: a major installation along the length of Gloucester Road tube station in London for Art on the Underground in 2018; Artist in Residence at the Drawing Room, London; Screens Series, New Museum, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Frieze Projects New York; 32nd São Paolo Biennale, Brazil; Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, the 14th Istanbul Biennial and Performa New York. Phillipson is also an award-winning poet and has published four volumes of poetry. She was named a Next Generation Poet in 2014, received Poetry Magazine’s Friends of Literature prize in 2016, and writes a regular column for ArtReview magazine. She received the Film London Jarman Award in 2016 and the European Film Award Selection from the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018.
