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Skimming distractedly over some shots of a male model in his underpants in a fashion mag, gazing at some bits of an anonymous steel-girder bridge, glancing distracted out of a car window as it exits a tunnel. It doesn’t sound like the makings of riveting video art, but Hilary Lloyd is here to show you otherwise. This is the Halifax-born artist’s first major show in Britain in a decade, but Lloyd’s intense attention to how video images relate to the technology that produces them, to how video alters our own consciousness of looking and seeing, and to how old and new image technologies clash and combine, is as sharp as ever.
Technology is right in your face here. So with underpants piece ‘Man’, 12 video projectors hang suspended in a tiered array, producing a grid of abutting images on the wall beyond. In each sequence, the camera wanders around the pages of the fashion mag, too close to make out the whole page. Fragments of the bloke in the pants slide around; a forearm, thighs, a sexy jawline. Restless and endlessly repeating, these slices of reality make us pay attention less to the image, and more to what gets in its way – the glossy sheen of the paper, the curve of the page – and to our own agitated scanning and hopping from one frame to another.
This might sound overly formal, but there’s a weird humour to it. Watching ‘Man’ also makes you feel like a very short-sighted voyeur, furtively ogling the fashion industry’s well-packed crotch, so that one can’t disentangle such everyday sensations from an awareness of the artifice of image-making. Other videos take their material from urban settings, but chop up their video fragments in ways which make their construction analogous to some physical property of their subject.
‘Crane’ is a vertical double-screen with a short snatch of movement sideways across an indistinct bit of industrial architecture, whose looping soundtrack produces a hard, metallic rhythm. Similarly ‘Tunnel’ misaligns two versions of the same moment of a car emerging from a dark tunnel, the paired sound going in and out of sync, producing a jarring, visceral crash when the two re-align. The most ambitious of these is ‘Motorway’, which collages various views of girders and metal lattices into a shifting, seductively coloured construction of overlapping sections across the wall, to the vague rumble of passing vehicles.
The brilliance of Lloyd’s work lies in how it manages both to reveal its representations as constructions, while simultaneously reworking them so that they acquire an uncanny sense of physical presence. That fusion, making what’s represented become present by other means, while always hooking it into the everyday, offers video as a place where one might reconstruct a sense of reality, rather than as a zone in which the everyday always ends up as a weightless, immaterial stream of fantasies and fictions.