Monday 12 September – Saturday 12 November 2016
Gallery 333 at the Exeter Phoenix.
All welcome – free
This new installation by Beth Emily Richards explores the fact and fiction surrounding pop legend Michael Jackson’s bizarre appearance at Exeter City’s football ground, St James’ Park, in 2002.
In conjunction with this installation, on Tuesday 4 October 2016, Beth will be presenting No Such Event Took Place, a short performance lecture investigating the 1999 Michael Jackson gig in Barnstaple’s Queen’s Theatre. This narrative is the starting point for conversations about lookalikes, reenactments, the power of audience belief, online fan forums, and the murky world of celebrity-obsessed tabloid journalism. It starts at 7 pm and is free.
Beth Emily Richards is a PhD researcher in the Performance.Experience.Presence (P.E.P) research group at Plymouth University, supervised by Prof Roberta Mock & Dr Anya Lewin. Her artistic research addresses the veracity of the archive, particularly the role of lens-based media and documentation in live artworks.
Beth utilises photographs, text, events and actions, performances to camera, sound works and props to subvert personal, sited and fictive histories. Strategies of ‘failure’ and changes of scale are often employed to disrupt expectations and hegemonies in a playful way. She employs reenactment to interrogate concepts of authenticity, and to play with the malleability of meaning created by images, artworks and narratives.
Gallery 333 is an intimate window gallery at the Exeter Phoenix for micro-installations and sculptural interventions