Am I Even Here

Will Kendrick

 24 March - 5 April 2017

"Barriers between the authentic and the implausible are breaking down. Reality is more subjective than ever, and the clear communication of ideas and opinions is difficult to achieve. Swept away on a looping tide of clickbait into seamless worlds of video game vistas where our news-feeds are tailored to our desires. We are told that we are all different, we are all individuals, and it’s coincidental we all want the same things, same images, same products, and same celebrities that shimmer and flicker before us" Charlotte Cousins

Sanding down the rubbing spots between planes of existence: real:virtual:botanical:human. Screen-lives buffer as ancient artefacts are re-branded for mass consumption. Sci-fi psychedelia assert parity while hierarchies bleed out in numerical free-fall. Revolution creeps on crepe soles, holding something that is half light- saber, half spirit-level. In a holding space for those who shuttle between worlds.

Am I Even Here is the second exhibition of arebyte LASER’s 2017 programme titled hotel generation - a series of paired exhibitions by a generation of young artists from around the UK, all responding to either contemporary Ordinaryism, information overload, collective practice or reacting to the ‘extreme present’.

Will Kendrick (1983, Blackpool UK), lives and works and London UK. He holds a Masters Fine Art Practice from Glasgow School of Art and a Bachelors Fine Art from Bath School of Art and Design. His work is centred around post digital cultural methods of production and archiving, consistently referencing the collapse and parallels of time experienced in our hyper-saturated, connected experience.

Solo exhibitions include: Am I Even Here, Arebyte Gallery, London; I’ll See You In ANother Life Brother, Serf, Leeds; I’ve never been there but I know what it looks like, AIR Sandnes Norway; Your Life is Yours to Consume, Supercollider, Blackpool; They Say Dreaming Is Dead, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow UK; Only the Statues Remain, Roman Baths, Bath; MMORPG, Spike Island, Bristol; Trichromatic, Elements, Bath.

Recent group exhibitions are On the Edge of a Continent, Glasgow International Glasgow; Feeling in the Eyes, Tenderpixel Gallery, London; Friends Only: The Internet is Present III, Pacific Place, Amsterdam; Sell Out, Seize Projects, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, Leeds; Up a Bit and to the Right, ROM8, Bergen Norway; Up Down and Around, GoMA, Glasgow; Beacons, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; The Lucky Jotter, FYC, Blackpool ; Relay, OVADA, Oxford; Proxy, TROVE Gallery, Birmingham).