Reality Loading Screen 1 (Seed)
9 of 10 Editions Available
.mp4 Created as part of the 2019 show 'Splits' at ODOX, Birmingham, UK. Originally, this work displayed on an iMac, played on an infinite loop. It is now available exclusively on Elementum, in an edition of 10.
The work shown as part of SPLITS is a broad response to the pervasive pathologisation of certain behaviours and thoughts. The artist aims to depict and dissect her experiences within community mental health services following a personality disorder diagnosis in 2018. The works themselves are the product of an artistic exploration of what it means to experience an 'unstable sense of self' — at both a personal and universal level - in the age of Instagram-reality and so-called 'toxic positivity'.
Bex Ilsley (b. 1988) is a transdisciplinary artist. Her artistic work spans video, photography, performance, VR, installation and sculpture.
She employs fantasy, performativity, objecthood and paradox as a lens through which to examine the authenticity of the self we advertise to the wider world. These explorations often lead to short, looping videos which twist in and out of the real and the virtual, exploring the spaces between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’, the artificial and the authentic, only to end up where they began.
Bex investigates online trends and oddities and parody them as a form of critique leading to sculptures which incorporate elements of leisure and commerce, screens and mirrors, amorphous forms, manufactured body parts – fragmented, perfected, malleable, thing-like. This is intended to reflect both the ways we live and present ourselves online, and the internal relationships we have with our own bodies and feelings.