Happening Tuesday, 1 September at 5:30pm UK-time. Book your free place in our [cloud] Shop.

Richard Ducker’s practice has always bordered on the strange. Not him or his work, but his exploration of strangeness in our language, belief systems, and ultimately how we perceive ourselves in the world around us. In 2016, I wrote this about This is the Second Evening I See 13 Rabbits on the Grass, an exhibition/installation he had at Arthouse1 Gallery in London:

For Richard Ducker the authentic self is constantly in a state of flux existing somewhere between fabrication and erasure, reality and myth. As an extension of autobiography in a symbiotic dependency with the work, it is in constant competition with itself. Displaced, memory falls out of sync in a collapse of the present into the past. Language becomes an alien form while sculpture performs as a prop on the set of a sci-fi metaphor. Connecting these discrete elements is a wall text. However, the words are untrustworthy, devious, and are out to mislead. Unspecified surveillance permeates the spliced extracts from the writings of the Heavens Gate cult, and ‘clippings’ from the artist’s own spam box and Facebook feed. Barely readable through lack of punctuation, it offers a glimpse into the overload of a repressed economy, the collapse of privacy, and its corollary, the conspiracy theory’s paranoiac escapism. Contact is attempted.

The strategies he used then are still at work in his practice today, though his focus is more on film than the other media he has worked with in the past. What was evident then, and is still apparent today, is his preoccupation with themes of displacement and dislocation in time and place. His reliance on sci-fi tropes taps into our own psychic displacements where we love to fantasise about our future world and other worlds, taking us far from the realities we may be struggling with. However, Richard also leans on those pressure points where these fantasies turn into fear, unhinging us from what we can rely on and taking us into the questionable existence of what becomes plausible in an off-kilter world. This is a strange place.

Richard will discuss his practice and the salient points that always return to displacement and dislocation. Join us on Tuesday, 1 September at 5:30pm for our first talk in our Virga Ozone programme. The talk is free, but booking is essential. Join us!