dylan hope
H : ladder
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H : ladder writes on the white walls of the gallery space. As a three-dimensional letter it attempts to re-function the gallery as a page and a rudimentary site of inscription. The shadow intends to open up the possibility of negative-language or projected inscription. As a ladder, this work experiments with the creation of an object in equilibrium. This work explores how the ladder, as a tool of movement (ascending and descending) could be rendered static, indeterminate and therefore stable. The H : ladder intends to be: ‘neither immobile nor empty,’ ‘reduced to [a visual and aspirate] silence.’ (Hélène Cixous, Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing, 1995.)
Dylan Hope is a Glasgow-based sculptor. His interdisciplinary works explore the arcane voice of power systems: a voice uttered in the modalities of suggestion and silence. Hope’s installations attempt to address the hollowness of a western world that is characterised by bureaucracy and confusion. Modelled on Walter Benjamin’s description of the fin-de-siécle Ragpicker and their unique abilility to reify a disconsolate past in the present, Hope’s works aim to bind together a sense of humour and uncertainty into a perspective from which one can observe this unstable social condition.
Theatrical elements are dislocated and transferred throughout his practice to reveal a vaudevillian opposition to the everyday. Dylan Hope’s installation work often asks its audience to reconstitute a pallid whole from a collection of disparate parts in what constitutes a veiled critique of the accepted definition and fetishisation of the objects, symbols and idols of culture.
Theatrical elements are dislocated and transferred throughout his practice to reveal a vaudevillian opposition to the everyday. Dylan Hope’s installation work often asks its audience to reconstitute a pallid whole from a collection of disparate parts in what constitutes a veiled critique of the accepted definition and fetishisation of the objects, symbols and idols of culture.