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Chris Oakley

Retellings

26 April - 7 June 2008

Chris Oakley’s work is concerned with how media and technology shape our experiences of the world. From the intervention of the camcorder in the tourist’s first-hand experience to the engineered narratives of ‘reality’ television, all of the works explore our need for experience productised, embellished and validated as consumable media.

In the work Sight/Seeing Oakley uses footage shot in the context of a modern safari in Southern Africa. He describes the work as, “part dystopic travelogue and part wildlife documentary”. He feels that tourism has commoditised the natural world, based upon the experience of spectacle, which becomes “consumed through the lens of a domestic camcorder… Seeing becomes secondary to recording.” His new work Exchanges, exhibited here for the first time, explores personal conversation on the telephone, and how our interactions are modified by the medium. He describes this work as a “wildlife documentary of the modern human”, exploiting techniques borrowed from documentary filmmaking to weave fictions from recordings from life.

Chris’s work has been exhibited internationally, and in the past 3 years has received exposure at exhibitions and festivals around the globe. His video The Catalogue, seen here for the first time in Wales, has won awards at the Moscow International Film Festival and first prize for video art at Videoformes 2006, France. He is currently completing a work based around nuclear research facilities in the UK, due to premiere in London in the autumn.