Hilary Lloyd
Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK
Jonathan Raban, in his masterpiece of urban lore, Soft City (1974), once pointed out that we all read each other through, ‘fragments, isolated signals, bare disconnected gestures, jungle cries and whispers.’ In Hilary Lloyd’s videos, films and slide presentations, these everyday codes form a beguiling, intimate-yet-elusive kind of portraiture, all the more resonant for its deftly executed simplicity – usually the camera is fixed and the editing kept to a minimum. Watching Lloyd’s work, one may encounter a young man languidly removing a sweater, two women unwinding a ball of wool, or a DJ practicing in her bedroom ahead of a major club night. In the past these videos often centred on a single subject (or, at most, two or three protagonists), but recently Lloyd has been documenting larger groups. In Car Wash (2005), for example, she followed the activities of a team of young Arab men at work in a Sheffield garage, displaying trophies of unmannered manliness – gold jewellery, tracksuits and toned bodies. Her latest videos take this fragmentation a step further, quietening the subject so that it is almost a background murmur.
Motorcycles (2008), a three-channel video projection occupying Sadie Coles’ entire ground-floor space, was filmed in a busy motorcycle garage over a period of several months. There was surprisingly little human presence on screen – at best, we saw a male hand (with a wedding ring; a small clue leading us nowhere) working an oily cloth around a camshaft, or a passing shadow reflected in a chrome hub. On the thunderous soundtrack, amongst high-octane motors revving, spanners clanging and drills whirring, we could occasionally make out muffled male banter, but the words remained obscure.
Despite – or rather, because of – this lack of human presence, the bikes became stand-ins for human identities. A retro Yamaha suggested an owner of middle age and mid-level income; a sporty Suzuki, an older sibling burning rubber; a scooter branded ‘Speedflight 100’, a teenager high on newly purchased freedom. To underscore this closed world of macho branding, Lloyd installed the audio and video equipment in aggressive, regimented order, each product proudly bearing its logo: Sanyo; Pioneer; JBL. Yet there was an almost lyrical sense underpinning all this testosterone; the garage is a craftsman’s arena, busy with human hands and redolent of craft’s haptic wisdom.
In contrast, Plant (2008) seemed strange and otherworldly. Presented on a modest video monitor in the gallery’s downstairs space, the work depicted an outcrop of South African ‘red hot poker’ flowers (or kniphofia) wobbling phallically in the breeze. As strangely unloosed signifiers, they reminded me of the urban myth that pampas grass in one’s front garden denotes a swinger – a childish story, no doubt designed to stigmatize those aged couples who simply liked the plant’s ‘estancia’ look. Kniphofia too suggests, like a nudging hint, that one has knowledge of foreign places, a badge of expensive holidays abroad. Sometimes the signs we send out to the world are intentional; sometimes, joyously, they are not.
Colin Perry
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