a-n Magazine : July 2001

David Sherry: Comfortably Being Alive : TINA FISKE


David Sherry, ‘David Sherry carries a bucket of water for a week’, 2000.

Tramway, Glasgow 4 May – 10 June

David Sherry is the first of five recipients of the Dark Lights Commission 2000 to show new work at Tramway, Glasgow this year. Sherry devises gently provocative and humorous projects that challenge our established modes of interaction and self-recognition. Here, he presents three works which scrutinise the 'static stability' of our daily worlds: "being alive", he suggests, "is the most unstable thing you can be."

Sherry's work typically involves an action (or inaction) which he himself undertakes, whether in a fictional or real situation (for a previous project he attended several job interviews). In the sound work, Investigation into Extreme Boredom, a friend discovers Sherry lying on the floor. His voluntary stillness parodies our self-made oblivion at the top of the evolutionary tree. It constitutes a refusal to go through the motions, inspiring instead, a stream of philosophising. Lying there, doing nothing, ironically proves a 'revelation'. The dialogue loops continuously, forcing the message home: 'even the numbness hurts like hell'.

Sherry also uses his light touch to mock our reliance on a mediated and synthetic experience of reality. A miniature model tanker, The Hasselhof (named after the BayWatch star), sits stranded amidst a large wooden oil slick: what's real (catastrophe) and what's TV, do we ask? Likewise our sense of history: in his video work (Untitled), Sherry re-enacts an ancient initiation rite for which tribesmen stitched boards to the soles of their feet. It is of course pure fabrication. Yet, by fusing the armchair familiarity of the daytime-TV DIY presenter and earnest inflection of the documentary narrator, Sherry gives it a ludicrous believability. On completing the grizzly task, he takes mournfully to his bed in a reality-TV twist, appearing finally in the street, healed and board-footed. Sherry's work is most engaging where he emerges as the unintended victim of his own schemes.

TINA FISKE
is doctoral candidate at University of Glasgow and a freelance writer.

First published in:
a-n Magazine July 2001
©Writer(s), artists, photographers and AN: The Artists Information Company
2001
All rights reserved.


David Sherry, ‘David Sherry carries a bucket of water for a week’, 2000.

original article : www.a-n.co.uk