Artists > 2010: Framing Identity > David Burrows & Simon O'Sullivan/ Plastique Fantastique

Work

Plastique Fantastique have created a stage for meditation on the potential meanings of identity, with location playing a part in its formation. The Mercury Pool is transformed into an alien crash site, where indecipherable shapes and motifs inhabit the clearing. What could be crop circles of a sort are drawn into the ground in fantastical colours – the aliens may already have been, or may be yet to come. The Visitation is only complete with its performances, entailing members of the public participating in ceremonies occupied with the transference of identity – renaming, masquerading, parading their newfound selves. Much of the inspiration for the work comes from the ancient tradition of Mumming, but can be seen in a more current light in the colossal uptake of Massively multiplayer online role-playing games (or MMORPGs) that enable users to adopt new identities, or avatars, whilst existing in a wild variety of virtual worlds. The work is, fittingly, completed with a comic and web-based works.

Biography

Plastique Fantastique - avatars from the extreme future and the past - is a fiction produced by David Burrows and Simon O'Sullivan and others. The fiction is created through the production and performance of protocols, objects and avatars first presented in writing, manifestos and comics. Plastique Fantastique is an exploration of the different temporalities and durations produced by art, popular and mass culture and sacred practices.

Exhibitions and events include: Staabucks Fukkee is your enemy, Aliceday Gallery, Brussels 2007; The Chymical Wedding, Tate Britain, London 2008; Protocols for Deceleration, Outpost, Norwich 2008; Black Mass for Partial Objects, for Event Horizon at Royal Academy, London 2008-9;Stranger things are happening, Aspex, Portsmouth 2009; Multiverse; Danielle Arnaud Gallery, London 2009.