Artist: Will Thompson
Exhibition title: The Word Projector
Venue: Union Pacific, London, UK
Date: January 13 – February 17, 2024
Photography: Reinis Lismanis / all images courtesy of the artist and Union Pacific, London
Human turns into object, a button in a biscuit tin. ‘The Word Projector’ is an exhibition that explores the dominant leitmotifs in how image and identity are displayed in the everyday.
Through the reduction of perspective, offering little or no background scenery, the artist turns the painted surface into drosscape; an idle landscape. The question ‘what is the image?’ reduces to ‘what does the image mean to me?’. What do these cut out photos– painted to resemble objects on a barren landscape, devoid of perspective– mean without their original context? Through variegated means, the artist suggests that you need both realism and surrealism to understand the reality that is imposed on you, and the world you live in; the realism of the painted figure and the surrealism of marginal distinctions, the single products diffracted to produce a serial conditioning of aesthetic. Industry means repetition.
Spherical objects go vroom vroom. The globe is a painted or printed sphere that presents a literal map of our planet but also a footnote of our existence. Boundary lines that were drawn– and are still being drawn– by a minority, dictate so much of how we are perceived. Placing multiple globes, each slightly different in age and aesthetic, on a card table becomes a subtle statement on the hand that you’ve been dealt. The museological encasement offers an ‘authentication’, suggesting the legitimacy of the author’s discourse, and posing the question of who codifies the things we see.
Our eyes are objects to be spun. Likewise, the self-portrait probes the realities of expression and the complicated nature of representation. Otto Dix offers a historical nod to Albrecht Dürer, whereas Thompson overlays his face onto Dix’s portrait, becoming a representation of a doctored-self; an antiquated deep-fake. Foucault noted that to ‘…be discovered in a state of anonymity– whether as a consequence of an accident or the author’s wish– the game becomes one of rediscovering the author’.
The lone animalistic sculpture is four objects. One a silicone face, one a chair and the last two a cotton shirt and woollen jumper. Together they are the projection of something a human could be.
