Jonathan Trayner & Jamie Dyson
‘After the Rain’
Film, 2022
From footage originally shot at the Grotto di Catullo (Italy) after a torrential downpour Dyson and Trayner overlay an exploration of these Roman ruins with a burgeoning soundscape of initially subtle birdcalls that rhythmically pulse and build through digital manipulation, eventually creating dissonance and disharmony, echoing the contradictory relationship humans have had historically with their environment. Referencing the Romantic history of the modern repurposing of antiquity and nature as an ideological prop and the tradition of the sublime, the artists invite the viewer to consider the absurdity of such concepts in the face of ecological collapse.
After the Rain responds to the question of the exhibition by positing the end of all human life where all our metaphysical contemplation has been rendered irrelevant by our inability to live with ourselves, and our world.
Price on Request
Extract of ‘After The Rain’
'The Devil Moves in Straight Lines'
Film, 2023
"This work plays with the myth that evil spirits can only move in straight lines and invites the viewer to contemplate how dead ideas can escape from the underworld and return to haunt the present, as Marx suggests – “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”."
Biographical information
Jonathan Trayner works primarily in video, performance, and printmaking, with the majority of his works discussing the intersection of politics, aesthetics and history.
Jamie Dyson is primarily interested with the ideas and practices of power, as it pertains to western ideological frameworks. He uses sound, drawing, video, and motion graphics to articulate, consider and deliberate on how this creates melancholy and subordinate subjects that survive in the inertia of the modern existence for the benefit of those ‘creators of Power’.
You can find the artists’ youtube and social media links here: www.trayner.org/