Andrew James Paterson

Ghosts of Home Entertainment, Trinity Square Video, February 17, 2011

The Ghosts of Home Entertainment showcases some of the core interests of Paterson's extensive artistic practice. Highlighted by his pointed, sometimes petulant, questioning of contentious cultural and philosophical issues, the works featured at TSV illustrate the artist's longstanding play with speech and language as repositories for divisions of discourse and power. Paterson's conversational scripts, with their droll parodying of the caustic symbiosis between artists and art bureaucrats, art and art galleries, making and collecting, image and meaning, attest to a world of blank and bored cultural production and consumption. His aesthetic aping of post-punk, new wave irony calls to attention slippages between discursivity and surface -- between the text of art and its experience, between the self and its representations, where word and image, analysis and sensation, blend. In a clairvoyant turn, Paterson's work outlines the digital age: the videos are fraught with characters stuck between consuming and producing, who just sit back and talk and watch -- and talk in text -- absorbed by their ghostly boundaries.