Alastair Laas

Lives and works in Brighton & London, UK

Artist statement

For twenty years, I built composites for television and advertising by sequencing narratives to convince an audience of something inauthentic. Today, my work turns those principles back on the systems responsible, through drawing, sculpture, moving image, installation and text. Playfully rejecting the boundaries industry maintains, I step just outside them with the formal decisions I make in a method known as ‘the scramble.’ By resequencing the properties of something, meaning forms in the jump between them, both chronologically and spatially. In drawings, I interrupt the logic of gesture with relief surfaces. In installations, I distort linear dialogue by dissociating elements. In moving image work, meaning is assembled in the interval between two states. Pursuing these grey zones is not a resolution but something held in the meanwhile, the space a system leaves when it is looking the other way. Modes of labour play an integral role in the work; speaking from within the system, I have found this industrial blind spot is my subject and my inheritance. Charcoal is combustion residue, and porcelain is fired earth – both carry the industrial heat of the Black Country, where I'm from. The synthetic language of subcultures – Fox against Nike, workwear versus leisurewear, social hierarchy worn on the body – is a battlefield of competing ideology, and the kind of culture war that industry relies on to drive consumption.

Artwork