Parade, by Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead, UK) a video installation with an unnerving sound: a parade of consuming pleasures in psychedelic decadence.
Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in association with the Brighton Photo Biennial for the Brighton Photo Biennial, and to accompany its major group exhibition Make Life Beautiful! The Dandy in Photography at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Mark Leckey’s Parade, a sound and video installation at Fabrica, continues the artist’s ongoing exploration of style subcultures and other contemporary icons. Leckey’s single-screen projection work is a stylish and provocative meditation on the theme of the metropolitan dandy. Intriguing and disturbing, Leckey’s oblique video narrative is a dark and claustrophobic vision of a man inhabiting a world of hallucinatory desire. A mind-rattling sound of a slightly distorted ‘P…RADE’ exasperates its visual sense of predatory fantasy. Brimming with literary/historical allusions, but equally deftly located within a distinctly contemporary demi-monde of visual art, music and fashion, Leckey’s oblique video narrative speculates on the kind of figure that dandies might cut in the not-too-distant future.
Leckey is a British contemporary artist. His found object art and video pieces, which incorporate themes of nostalgia and anxiety, and draw on elements of pop culture, span several works and exhibitions. His work has looked at the relationship between popular culture and technology as well as exploring the subjects of youth, class and nostalgia. He won the 2008 Turner Prize. He works with sculpture, film, sound and performance – and sometimes all four at once. Leckey’s work explores the intersection of several cultures: youth, rave, pop, and the history of Britain. His practice is similarly eclectic, bringing together sculpture, film, sound, and performance.
Leckey’s breakthrough film montage Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore follows Britain’s underground club scene from the 1970s to the 1990s. Using a compilation of found footage, Fiorucci came about long before the mash-up culture of YouTube and is a super-cut of shared and personal memory. Dream English Kid, 1964–1999 AD is another video collage. It draws on archival material from television shows, advertisements and music. In doing so, it creates a record of all the major events in the artist’s life from the 1970s through the 1990s, bridging personal and cultural history.
His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including solo exhibitions at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, in 2008 and at Le Consortium, Dijon, in 2007. His performances have been presented in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art, Abrons Arts Center; at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, both in 2009; and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York City, in 2008. His works are held in the collections of the Tate and the Centre Pompidou.
Commissioned and produced by Film + Video Umbrella in association with the Brighton Photo Biennial.
