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CV
An Everyday Garden Planted by William, Landscaped by Georges, Conserved by Michel, Weeded by Nicholas, Cropped, Dressed and Tossed by Sally, 2022
Video (duration: 3 mins) and custom stand
Three-Scoop Complicator
MattFlix
15 January – 19 February 2021
A season of video and audio works.
Each week, the Complicator extracted three pieces from the mesh. Some are essayistic, many narrative, a few instructional or taxonomical. Most are fantastical, absurd and deeply serious. They hinge on talking heads, talking body parts, talking creatures, talking things, invented institutions, infrastructures and processes. Some were made in lieu of talks, for performances, in response to archives, for fun; some solo, some collaboratively. Music and language spills throughout. And everything is complicating.
Puss in Boots
The Open Arms
24th December 2020 - 31st January 2021
By Sally O'Reilly,
with Sean Ashton, Anat Ben David, Peter Blegvad, Klara Kofen, Neil Luck, Matt Rogers, James Oldham, Lauren Silver, Paul Tarragó, Jennet Thomas and friends...
Gin-Box Compliances
July 2020
Video
3 1/2 mins
Object theatre for camera, made for The Purgatory Shelf Object Theatre Variety Show,
in The Open Arms, with Wastepaper Opera, 30 July 2020.
How to Rewild Your Writing
January 2020
Video
8 1/2mins
A writing exercise made for Cabinet magazine's panel and practicum event 'The Virtual Sentence',
Berlin, 17 January 2020.
HERMES
December 2017
Audio
22 mins
To be listened to while travelling on a train – any train, so long as the journey duration is 22 mins or longer
Music by Matt Rogers
HERMES comprises spoken word and electronically generated music. Within the matrix of its fiction it is a technological tool that pretends to be able to make the listener’s train run on time. It bases its efficacy on the notion that no situation is anticipatable, and proceeds via a comic misapplication of the power of language. The voice apparently embarks on the task of itemising every destination and time that the traveller does not want to arrive at, and in naming every possible fault – human or technical – that could divert the train from its proper schedule.
The piece is a farce of connectivity and multiplicity. It is an instant of willed conflation of the literary and the technological, and it exercises some of my thinking about incommensurate temporal frameworks. For a full account, see Chapter Six and the accompanying documentation.
Download the audio here.
All the Knowledge in Age UK
2016
video, curtains
10mins
The structure has been made from all the floral curtains bought from the Dean Forest Hospice shop throughout the two-month-long Blackrock residency, and the video features all the non-fiction books bought on a single trip to Age Concern.
The video takes the non-fiction made available to the general public – books filled with knowledge that is technical, educational or entertaining – and wilfully misinterprets it. It exaggerates how information that finds its way out of corporate laboratories, university research programmes and other specialist environments into the public realm is, by necessity, simplified and generalised. And yet the video’s narrator – a neologism who wishes to enter the language it is studying – learns from these books not utilitarian wisdom, but the contradictions and blind alleys that constitute modernity, that make it so difficult to ‘know’ anything at all.
The Harris Garulatrix
2016
shoe, audio
14 mins, 20 secs.
A recording of a monologue plays through a hidden speaker, as if the shoe itself were speaking – a talking head. The garulatrix is a scold and a gossip, imparting vicious observations about the other artworks in the show, and insulting the viewer while she’s at it.
Commissioned by Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston.
Voice performed by Rosie Thomson.
Exhibited in 'Nothing Happens, Twice'
6 February – 4 June 2016
Harris Museum & Art Gallery, Preston
The Forgotten Waterbearer
2015
Video
15 mins
A fairy tale, with a strong gender-politics undertow, is related using found footage, written and filmed intertitles, and audio montaged from several sources. It merges ideas of plumbing – as industrial and domestic conduits for water and oil – with the human body and the channels of deep time.
Divining the Title of a PhD
Matt Rogers & Sally O'Reilly
2013
Video
4 mins, 30 secs
A satirical take on the increasing specialisation within knowledge economies. The postcodes of the filmed locations also reveal something about the processes involved in naming streets.
Hands Up!: a manual
2011
Video
20 mins
Do I Really Look Like That?
Colin Perry & Sally O'Reilly
2011
Video
40 mins.
A montage of portrayals of fictional artists in television programmes (not film). Clips have been categorised and arranged to emphasise a taxonomy of preconceptions, which includes the pretentious, the impenetrably absurd, the conniving and the psychotically deranged.
For the Curious
2010
Video
10 mins.
A found footage video essay discussing the pros and cons of curiosity.