Exhibitions » Exhibition Archive » SQUARE2 Archive » Bryce Galloway
Bryce Galloway
4 April - 5 May 2011 in the Square² Gallery
Untitled (Hair Transposal Video) is the latest video by Bryce Galloway. It finds the artist in his bathroom, topless, attempting to transfer and glue the hair from his chest to the bald patch on his scalp. This involved process takes over ten minutes, during which Galloway concentrates intensely—almost as hard as the viewer, who is caught somewhere between mild disbelief, and the glee of watching an adult engaged in decidedly and endearingly un-adult behaviour.
Galloway’s last video project was the installation Daddy Doo, shown at the New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington (2007) and Auckland (2008). However, Galloway is better known to many for his long-running and still current fanzine, Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People, and for his work with the band Wendyhouse in the 1990s.
While Untitled (Hair Transposal Video) does not share Daddy Doo’s theme of parenting, the work extends Daddy Doo’s video-diary aesthetic and self-mocking social satire. The video also shares qualities with Galloway’s fanzine and music. Galloway’s fanzine, Incredibly Hot Sex with Hideous People, is a largely autobiographical narrative in text and drawing, mining the most embarrassing moments of Galloway’s everyday life. And while the quirky punk-pop of Wendyhouse might initially seem a far cry from Galloway’s cringe-inducing video-diary, social satire again proves a common thread, especially as it pertains to notions of machismo and male sexuality.
This thread of consistency across Galloway’s entire practice becomes apparent in the latest film, linking performance, illustrated narrative and video-as-journal. He occupies the foreground in all these settings, playing a dual role: he is both an everyman facing banal everyday realities, and an unusual individual absorbed in peculiar ritual. What seems to be changing is the degree to which the artist’s own life enters the work, and the increasing generosity with which Galloway offers up his own shortcomings as material for his art.
Bryce Galloway lives and works in Wellington, where he is a lecturer at Massey University’s School of Fine Arts.
BRYCE GALLOWAY
4 April–5 May 2011
Untitled (Hair Transposal Video) 2011
DVD
Duration: 11:11 minutes, looped
Courtesy the artist