Reversion of the Beast Folk

04.02.04 - 27.03.04

Mark Aerial Waller’s Reversion of the Beast Folk is a film, a piece for fluorescent strip lights, an expanded foam cave, and a selection of masks and drawings of movie icons. The film opens with the view from the passenger seat of a Lamborghini Countach, which screeches through traffic on an endless highway, passing cars inside and out. Cutting to a barren landscape, two figures are seen to emerge from behind a rock and meander through the depth of field. Here Waller, who approaches his work through the reading of classic literature, employs H.G. Wells’ endlessly perverted The Island of Doctor Moreau as his field of agitation.

Reversion of the Beast Folk concerns the conquest of new territory, pre-judgement and swift punishment, and the laying down of a New Law. For the film’s soundtrack Waller employs Beethoven’s Emperor in collision with recordings of the camera’s own mechanism. The work climazes with Brazilian Umbanda, music for religious ritual dedicated to the goddess of sex, Pomba Gira, with the gallery bathed in red fluorescents for the entr’acte.

As well as being an artist interested in producing densely coded filmworks that are open to a complex range of interpretations Waller also operates The Wayward Canon, a flexible platform for the critical re-evaluation of cinematic practices. Recent exhibitions to which he has contributed include Traversees (Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 2002) and Changing Times (Tate Britain, London 2003).