Click here for more images and a exhibition review by Russell Herron

Press Release

"Yes, sometimes the wildest notion, the most apparently impossible idea, takes such a firm hold of the mind that at length it is taken for something recognisable*
Fyodor Dostoyevsky "The Gambler"

To enter into Professor Timecreep's academy, is to be lured into a hinterland of mysterious enchantment, referencing Victorian Hermetica and the elite order of the
Golden Dawn, a late 19th century secret society preoccupied with the alchemical control of invisible forces.

In a world suffused with the magicality of early science, and the theatricality of a Madam Blavatsky séance, the artist Ruth Calland in the guise of the venerable professor will be conducting a psychic experiment between a person and a cultural artefact.

Subject, professor and object will all be linked by connecting wires to allow a flow of communication between the participants whose blood pressure and temperature will be taken before and after the experiment to measure and record any changes. For Timecreep likes to chase lightning and is fascinated by the transformative power of interactivity:

"everywhere there were spectres in the stones. If you stare at these things long enough they begin to stare back." [1]

In a dimly lit curtained off room in the historically charged environs of the Vestry Museum where mise en scene faux scientific enquiry meets re-anime B movies, Professor Timecreep becomes the cipher of interconnectivity as s/he draws the resultant images transmitted from subject and object through the 'telepathic' wires.

In this experiment Timecreep investigates the mystic sketchpad of drawing as a transcendental model for potentiality In this "constant rehearsal for uncertainty"[2] Timecreep is concerned with "trying to raise the threshold of not knowing"[3]

Calland consciously utilizes homemade aesthetics; for the performance Timecreep wears a metal helmet made of an every-day colander and on closer inspection the wires are nothing other than string in a deliberate de-skilling of scientific paraphernalia and process. The effect of this conspicuous artifice allows for humour and the construction of a fictive and synaesthetic[4] freefall space.

For all its crackling whiz and burr of archaic radio waves, its end of the pier, table tapping theatricality, at its core Calland's aim is true and reflects a very contemporary premise which recognises that authenticity and inauthenticity are no longer mutually exclusive.[5]

Like some latter day Tommy Cooper, Professor Timecreep utilises his faux farce experiments as portals to the uncharted realm of the unconscious.

Contact details, Ruth Calland: 020 8509 0537 ruth8@tinyworld.co.uk

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[1] " On the Road a Profile of Iain Sinclair "Stuart Jeffries, from The Guardian 24.04.04\

[2] What art does for you is that it constantly rehearses you for uncertainty" Brian Eno talking to the Melody Maker from Rip it Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds - Faber and Faber 2005, p144

[3] Professor Timecreep

[4] "the concept of synaesthetics has been with me since when I read gene youngblood's book "expanded cinema". There youngblood promotes the synaesthetic mode as "expanded consciousness" and many ways of knowing, simultaneously omi-operative" from Painting/as Camp!dis/charge Operato/rs Hans Schierl MA research paper Central St Martins 2003 p.6

[5] "It seems like we've reached a point of cultural sophistication where we can have a simultaneous appreciation of authenticity and inauthenticity within the same utterance"
from Post Irony The Americans New Art by Mark Sladden Cubborn Editions 2001