Emma Kay at Chisenhale - London - Brief Article

In an animated video titled The Future from Memory, commissioned for Chisenhale's cavernous East End space, British artist Emma Kay carried her sustained textual investigation into the nature of collective "knowledge" (or, in this case, speculation) beyond the contemporary and into the shape of things to come.

Entering the darkened gallery, visitors were confronted with a large white screen occupying the center of the facing wall. Lines of black text emerged from the bottom of the screen and scrolled up and away toward a vanishing point some-where near the top. The graphic effect was reminiscent of the opening credits of Star Wars. Unlike that sci-fi classic, however, Kay's script never gave way to an image. It just reeled on and on in an endless video loop. The austere presentation, its starkness increased by the fact that the projection was silent, made the work seem initially uninviting, but The Future from Memory was more than just a dry conceptual exercise.

In order to create it, Kay trawled her own recollections of things she'd read in the realms of communications, medicine, spirituality, economics, government and more or less every other field for which a vision of the future has ever been proposed. The resulting text is an absorbing composite portrait of human aspiration and anxiety, inviting viewers to read about a legal battle over the ownership of DNA code one minute, and the colonization of other planets the next. There are no specific references to future art movements in this personal encyclopedia, although the death of the museum is apparently not far off. A product called "intelligent paint" and corporate ownership of the color spectrum might also give devotees of oil on canvas cause for concern.

This is Kay's most accessible piece to date. Previously, she has attempted to rewrite the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare without recourse to the originals. Only the absurd scale of ambition involved made those text works interesting; they were, ultimately, unreadable. The Future from Memory, on the other hand, was the artistic equivalent of a page-turner (albeit without pages).

COPYRIGHT 2001 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group