Thomas Demand

Recorder & Space Simulator – Thomas Demand

Last week I visited the Thomas Demand exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The artist photographs models of interiors and public locations that he has painstakingly and methodically constructed using paper and cardboard to the finest of detail – indeed is only at very close view that these apparently ‘real’ photographs reveal their ‘simulation’. Many of the interiors have a clean but mundane appearance – I later found out that Demand often reconstructs models of images he has seen in the media, a further investigation into the way we obsess over media imagery and a way of creating tension between the fabricated and the real world.

One piece I found particularly mesmerising was actually the only film in the show. Recorder is a Super-8 loop of a reel-to-reel tape machine playing a snippet of a Beach Boys melody, which becomes highly recontextualised in its newly constructed mantra mode. You can view the loop at Thomasdemand.

Further links:
At the Victoria Miro
At the Moma