Nicki Rolls
LXR1
About the artist
Working in a variety of media, I intend to manipulate our emotional response to ideas of time, life, death and continuity. Frequently combining constructed environments with real life, I explore how the fake or the imitation can disrupt and challenge conventional perspective. I am interested in the notion that life is solely a series of cycles in which repetition is the driving force. My videos often distend and disrupt behavioral patterns in order to expose repetition as a possible clue to existence.
About the work
A model installation of thousands of balls cascading across light beds is placed within a built environment that borrows from the architecture of a Victorian pump house. Real footage (from Kew Bridge Steam Museum) has been combined with video of the model, together evoking a sense of emotional place, drawing on a collective memory of industrial spaces. The space is lit to suggest late afternoon or dusk, the absence of colour and people giving it a dream-like quality. By using models combined with real footage, the work attempts to create a disquieting uncertainty about what really exists and what does not, what the work is and why it has been created. LXR1 explores ideas about time, continuity and repetition. Placing different elements with their opposites - movement with stillness, light with dark, order with chaos, modernity with history - I am interested in the boundaries between them, though these appear gradual and undefined. The repetition of the cascading balls is continuous - there is no beginning and no end and no differentiation between beginning and end. The name, LXR1, suggests a machine number but also plays on the word elixir and the notion of life prolonged indefinitely.