‘Listen To Me’, 2008
Mark Selby works with sculpture, film and installation, concerned with the functionality and disfunctionality of domestic design. In recent sculptural works Selby questions how communication between subjects is interfered with and problematised by the very technology that seeks to improve and proliferate our possibilities to connect with each other. Working with solid structures and materials, his sculptures investigate that which constantly slips away: the meeting of two minds, and what passes between them.
In works such as Hot Seat, Vanity Basin and Let’s Sit Down and Talk, the absence of human performers explicit. Simple pieces of household furniture – tables, chairs and cabinets made from the same bleached ply-wood are combined with other domestic objects – sinks, mirrors, fans – to convey a sense of the useful that is sadly frustrated. Selby’s unplugged apparatuses for communication and beautification sit in the gallery space, somewhat forlorn and lifeless without the activation of electricity, or human usage.
Other works suggest the intimacy of social encounters, interrupted and complicated by the ever increasing mechanisms designed to connect people. Mobile Phone literalises the artist’s wry take on these new technologies: Atop a cabinet on wheels sits a mini mast, with a basic telephonic device made from tin cans and string, recognisable from childhood. The sculpture is humorous, even cartoon-esque with its visual pun on ‘mobile phone’, evoking a certain Flintstone aesthetic of functional design. Listen To Me is less benign however in its representation hierarchies of communication via such technology. No less than four loud speakers are positioned at one end of a tilted table, pointing at a chair that appears to be sinking into the concrete floor underneath the weight this amplification. The chair at the opposite end of the table is elevated; though the work is silent, its imperative: ‘listen to me!’ is emphatically made.
Mark Selby graduated with an MA in Fine Art Sculpture from Wimbledon College of Art in 2008, and is a lecturer in the Further Education department at UCA Maidstone. He recently won the Clifford Chance Sculpture Award, to be unveiled this month in Canary Wharf. Recent exhibitions include participation in Afluenza, Clerkenwell, London and Short Fall, Hand and Heart Gallery, Nottingham.
To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here.
Marianne Mulvey
