Introduction To The Memory Personality [2013]
David Cronenberg: Transformation
CastUnknown
For this startling new variation on his acclaimed installation Introduction to the Memory Personality, Jeremy Shaw places the spectator alone in a kind of cabin, where strategies around hypnotism and mind manipulation generate a profound sense of dread, a feeling that a buried taboo — in the form of a foreign body — has been shot directly into the
The idea of brain infiltration and its systematic alteration is the stuff of high-art speculative science fiction — Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange and David Cronenberg's Videodrome are among the best — and huckster throwbacks, like 1980s Scientology personality tests and creepy thrift store self-help kits. Jeremy Shaw's much-celebrated installation Introduction to The Memory Personality marries these two traditions to create a mysterious world of beautiful music and disturbing imagery. Mounted in an earlier form for the One on One show at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, the work requires the viewer to take a solitary fixed perspective, alone, inside a kind of cabin. Its multiple strategies around hypnotism and mind manipulation generate a profound sense of dread, a kind of seance for buried taboos, complete with a multi-dimensional soundtrack that makes the experience exponentially more terrifying.
Presented and organized in partnership with MOCCA, 952 Queen Street West. Runs daily, September 5 to 15. Exhibition continues until December 29, 2013.