Grace Schofield’s ‘Business Man on the Tracks’ is the first in a series of works shown on a large billboard constructed on the rooftop space above the Sunday Painter Gallery in Peckham. The space sits directly opposite the platforms of Peckham Rye Station, in full view of the commuting public. The work will be shown from 7 – 21 October.
“For the film ‘Business Man on the Tracks’, Schofield uses a basic CGI program to create a nightmarish scenario, a suited man appears stranded, darting about the train tracks with his briefcase adrift.
As with a lot of Grace’s recent work, the spaces in which the virtual actors sit are the ever reduplicating ‘non-places’ of today; hotels, golf courses, and in this instance a nondescript section of railway. They are in a sense the embodiment of the virtual; generic and fleeting, their reality is solely dependent on our interaction with them.
For the viewer standing on the platforms of Peckham Rye station their surroundings, and perhaps for the disgruntled commuters, their sentiments are to an extent mirrored; yet here it is a two-way mirror, incapable of returning a virtual gaze, the avatars actions repeated forever (or as long as we look at them) in a universe of ineffective boredom. As you watch the film however, the repetitiveness becomes mildly hypnotic, and leaves you with the disorientating prospect of forgetting what side of this ‘mirror’ you are on.”
Grace Schofield is an alumnae of the BA Fine Art course at Chelsea College of Art and Design.
