Richard Sides

Richard Sides is a multidisciplinary artist who employs, remediates and reappropriates the plethora of low-value, mundane and sometimes obsolete objects at his disposal to create works in moving image, sculpture, text and sound. His works explore contemporary mass media and the onus placed on subjects to shed their agency in the face of biopower and under the conditions of capitalism. Sides considers his works time-based collages, imagined in the three-dimensionality and immersivity of the exhibition space. In Sides’ landmark exhibition, ‘the omega point just ate his brains…’ (2013), kettles, water bottles and a jumble of extension leads - perhaps the detritus of neoliberalism - are littered throughout the gallery space, providing the backdrop for his moving image works. These are displayed on sputtering projectors seemingly, and symbolically, on the precipice of malfunction and collapse. Sides often lets cacophonies of ambient sound permeate throughout the gallery – for example Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata combines with music from French organist Olivier Messiaen in ‘the omega...’ – something he has consistently investigated alongside his contemporary, Haroon Mirza, in an ongoing project called ‘Sound Spill’. ...