GATESHEAD.- Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art presents The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim, a video by David Blandy from Monday 27 April.

David Blandy’s work deals with his problematic relationship with popular culture, integrating fantasy adventures with real life in a search for his cultural position in the world. His video performance work The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim documents a journey of discovery. The Pilgrim, is a lone character wearing the orange robes of a Buddhist Shaolin Monk and carrying a portable record player. In his episodic adventure he is searching for ‘soul’, as a hermit in an 18th Century Park in Surrey, on an American road trip, journeying through the Lake District and the city of London .

Footage of the artist as The Barefoot Lone Pilgrim is edited with appropriated excerpts from films such as Shogun Assassin and Princess Mononoke and television programmes Kung Fu and Monkey. Revealing cultural confusion and questioning myth, custom and symbolism, Blandy’s work asks about the construction of identity in a mass-media context.

Alessandro Vincentelli, Baltic’s Acting Head of Programme adds: “It is very pertinent that we are presenting David Blandy’s work at the same time as the major group show A Duck for Mr Darwin. Both exhibitions capture the human need for discovery, journeying around the world searching for knowledge and a better understanding of ourselves and nature. However Blandy brings the subject directly into present day as he looks for his cultural position within the world; investigating how an individual is formed by the mass-media of records, films and television, and whether they have an identity beyond these external influences.”

David Blandy has exhibited widely both in the UK and abroad at venues such as at Gasworks, London ; FACT, Liverpool; Cornerhouse, Manchester ; PS1 Gallery, New York; and the Centre d'art Contemporain, Geneva . Blandy has had solo shows in London , Beijing , and this year at Spike Island , Bristol ; 176, London and Turner Contemporary, Margate . His work featured in last year's Liverpool Biennial at Bluecoat.