Billy Howard Price
Foma

Exhibition open:
22.3.14 – 13.4.14
Sat. – Sun. 12:00 – 18:00

Private view:
Thursday March 20th 19:00 – 21:00

'Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy'. The Books of Bokonon 1:5 Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A real holy man was born from a man not wholly real, continuing the new line at the top of the range. Over the moving surfaces of the mountain water he soaked up crystal clear still images and dropped them in a photo stream. The moving images vibrated with static. This was when the past was tense. A truly 21st century guru, with millions of followers and posts all around the world, he taught us to access our inner net rather than the internet. From this rock they built his church, and adorned every doorway with his mantra; Love All Serve All. He branded his name and sold an incense with a smell everybody nose. Listen and you might hear him; his name is truth.

Billy Howard Price’s films and installations treat the technical production of images and mediascapes as an experiment in psychotropic mind control. They appropriate the rhetoric and aesthetic of new age cults, advertising and music videos to interrogate the relationship between moving images, truth and belief.

Foma, Price's first solo exhibition, juxtaposes the rhythmic structuring of video and the linguistic nuances of printed text as a tactile material within the social construction of esoteric ideology. Taking the mutation from spirituality to commodity as an inherent precondition of the modern age, the exhibition looks at how this transition plays out in the transient surfaces that mediate our interaction with it, as lofty ideas of the other are continually abstracted and warped by inevitable physical and theoretical obsolescences.

For more information visit billyhoward.co.uk