Demolition/Escape

Demolition/Escape brings together three artists whose work with video and sound shares a concern with movement, risk and inversion. The exhibition features Tina Keane’s Escalator (1988), fully restored and exhibited for the first time in over thirty years, alongside newly commissioned works by Hilary Lloyd and James Richards. 

First presented in the 1980s, Escalator organizes attention through verticality and serial arrangement. Across eleven pairs of stacked monitors, the left screens show suited city workers ascending into a world of glass and steel, while the right show the city’s homeless occupying underground stations. Its looping ascent and descent do not resolve into arrival but return the viewer to the same point, producing a suspended, repetitive temporality. Reversal and replay estrange familiar gestures from habitual meaning and lend everyday movement new symbolic weight. Inversion operates here, and in the practices of Lloyd and Richards in different ways, as a critical method.