This exhibition is a sensory invitation to experience Turner Prize Winner Laure Prouvost’s video work in tandem with newly commissioned installation and live work by Sydney-based artist Emily Parsons-Lord.

Prouvost and Parsons-Lord create a playful and seductive pairing where they intersect human sensuality, technology and nature. Highlighting how we perceive the world through our senses they also playfully interrogate the ways in which we seek to make sense of it – from everyday devices to innovative science, superstition and speculation.

Prouvost’s video works Swallow and Lick in the Past invoke the senses – touch, taste, sight and sound – creating dreamlike scenarios that capture the beauty of nature and the freedoms of youth. The works journey us to the idyllic and timeless pleasures of the Italian countryside and to the wistful speculations of adolescents in LA. With humour, Prouvost seems to relish our once-natural state of communing with nature and the small but persistent ways in which digital technologies jolt us away.

Parsons-Lord makes sculptural installations that bring together biotechnology and participatory experiences. Looking to past and future, this new work examines the timeless human impulse to reimagine and alter the environment, whether in physical or conceptual ways. It takes inspiration from interpretations of atmospheric events as portents – or omens – such as the weather phenomenon of ‘blood rain’. For instance, in the immersive environment The Sky is Falling (then let us run) Parson-Lord reflects on human inflicted environmental damage and geoengineering solutions that will likely produce profound aesthetic effects. Generations to come may find themselves under a differently-coloured sky.

A live public event will accompany the exhibition, presenting a collaboration between Emily Parsons-Lord and musicians Jane Grimm and Sue Christie. Creating a musical interpretation of ‘blood rain’, the composition will be performed on Viols, string instruments of the historical era from which accounts of ‘blood rain’ emerge.

Image Credits
Emily Parsons-Lord, melting gallium performance installation, 2018
Laure Prouvost, Swallow, 2013. Courtesy of Laure Prouvost and LUX, London