Jamie Crewe: Pastoral Drama

Tue-Fri 12 - 5pm
Sat & Sun 12  -6pm
CLOSED Mondays

Over the course of a year, Jamie Crewe has worked on Pastoral Drama every day. The piece comprises two parallel videos, played simultaneously, that use allegory and animation to think about progress. Through chronological filming of intricate drawings, speckled clay, and encrusted plasticine, Jamie reflects upon the evolution of narratives, (inter-) personal change, and the imperatives of invisibility. Using these two videos, Pastoral Drama parallels the ancient Greek myth of Eurydice and the Underworld with Eumelio, a 17th-century opera composed by Agostino Agazzari for the inhabitants of an Italian seminary. Drawing on the story of the earlier myth, Eumelio’s titular male character stands in for Eurydice, and achieves a different fate. In its double telling, Pastoral Drama emphasises the cleft between boy and woman, and envisions the collapse of a mythic past in the dangerous afterworld of the present.

At Tramway these videos are accompanied by new works which expand on the themes of rule-setting, demonic half-people, transgender subjectivity and representational ambivalence. In her myth Eurydice is maintained on a journey back from death by being unacknowledged and unseen by her rescuer — following this model, Jamie’s exhibition considers acknowledgements that might cause a vulnerable subject, or a delicate knowledge, to flee, or disappear. At its most hopeful, it tests how such a vulnerable and delicate thing might move forward, into the unknowable changes of the future.