David Blandy

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David Blandy (born 1976) is a British artist. He was educated at the Slade School of Fine Art and the Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. His most recent exhibition is "Represent", a two-person show with Swedish artist Saskia Holmkvist at Gasworks, London. Blandy will have his first solo show at Cell Project Space, London, in 2007, as part of Jerwood Artist Platform.

Blandy produces video, performances and comics that deal with his problematic relationship with popular culture, highlighting the slippage and tension between fantasy and reality in everyday life. Either as a white man mouthing the words to the underground soul classic “Is it because I’m black” in ‘hollow bones’ (2001), or being taught how to make art by the deceased martial arts star Bruce Lee in ‘emotional content’ (2003), Blandy searches for his cultural position in the world. His work humorously asks the difficult question of just how much the self is formed by the mass-media of records, films and television, and whether he has an identity outside that.

After gaining an artist’s residency with Grizedale Arts in 2004, Blandy has continued this investigation in his recent Barefoot Lone Pilgrim video/performance pieces in which he integrates real life and virtual adventures. Donning the orange robes of a Buddhist Shaolin Monk, his portable record player in hand, he has been a hermit in an 18th Century park, Painshill Park in Surrey, made an American road trip, and searched for the places that had associations with soul songs in New York. In this most recent pilgrimage, Blandy’s monk headed for the Lake District in the north of England, to search for the "Soul of the Lakes" (2005), walking between the two record shops in the area. Intercutting the footage of the "real" journey with segments from films such as "Shogun Assassin" and "Princess Mononoke" and television programmes "Kung Fu" and "Monkey", Blandy weaves together an idiosyncratic tale of self-discovery which is all the more believable for its shifts into fantasy and personal reverie.

In another strand of his work, Blandy collaborates with young people to form documentaries or alternative video portraits. In "Radio Nights" (2005)Blandy continued his relationship with the young people from the Avenues Youth Project in Queen's Park, London, following on from a previous Artangel Interaction commission. It investigates the invisible worlds of the listeners and broadcasters of West London's rich radio culture, from late night call-ins to underground MCs tussling for airwaves, from the pirate innovators of the 1980s to the Grime stars of the future. Blandy continued the collaboration by taking members of the Avenues to participate in the Coniston Water festival, juxtaposing urban and rural cultures, dressing a boat in “bling” and performing grime in a Tudor barn. While there, the Avenues co-composed a new song “The Cumbrian Way” with children John Ruskin High School in Coniston.

Blandy’s video work is distributed by LUX: www.lux.org.uk and is supported by an Artsadmin Live Arts Bursary 2005-2006

David Blandy’s recent group exhibitions include Projekt Migration, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 2005; The Mind is a Horse (Part II), Bloomberg Space, London; New Contemporaries 2004, Barbican, London, 2004; Ethnic Marketing, Centre d’art Contemporain, Geneva, 2004 and Romantic Detachment, PS1, New York and touring, 2004.

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