MAstars 2012: Toby Phips Lloyd, MFA

MAstars 2012: Toby Phips Lloyd, MFA Toby Phips Lloyd, The Magic They Had Tried To Harness Was Beginning, Instead, To Ride Them - Artist Studio, 2012. MDF, wood, found objects, furniture, fabric, strip lights and carpet tiles. 250cm x 800cm x 850cm. Credit: James Sebright

Katharine Welsh selects Toby Phips Lloyd from Newcastle University for MAstars


The Magic They Had Tried To Harness Was Beginning, Instead, To Ride Them.

In Toby Phips Lloyd’s absorbing installations we find ourselves in a place where fantasies and realities meet; a place of alter egos and interweaving narratives where we may even become protagonists. For the MA show Phips Lloyd produced 'The Magic They Had Tried To Harness Was Beginning, Instead, To Ride Them', a work consisting of three interconnected rooms, referencing popular culture and psychoanalysis, that exploits the full potential of installation.

We first entered a small gallery space showing 'Body Without Organs' by 'Toby Lloyd', which included video and photographic documentation of a performance in which the artist apparently buried himself, alive. The work alludes to the image used by philosophers Deleuze and Guattari to refer to the potentials of every body: ''To make oneself a body without organs, then, is to actively experiment with oneself to draw out and activate these virtual potentials.''

To the left, behind the gallery space, was an artist's studio. Images of Matthew Barney's 'Drawing Restraint' and Chris Burden's 'Five Day Locker Piece' were tacked up on the wall - just the sort of references we might expect from an artist who buried himself. The studio is not Mike Nelson-style hyper-real immersive fiction, rather, the visible wall construction signals that this is a staged space - neither fiction nor reality, but something in between. On the wall was the following quotation: ''The studio, for 'Kippenberger, is a place of masking and disguising – where the metamorphosis from ordinary person to superhero happens literally'''. On the desk was a notebook covered with scribbled notes to 'be more confident' and 'be a better version of you (or become a better you or person)'. Is this Toby Lloyd the performance artist or Toby Phips Lloyd? On the wall, Jacques Lacan's diagram of interlocking rings representing the symbolic, imaginary and the real pinned up alongside an amended version including 'Toby', 'Phipps', 'Lloyd' and the 'Rreal' reinforced the idea that this was a space between.

We exited the studio through a shiny red curtain that looked as if it would perhaps lead to a Lynchian antechamber for some supernatural bureaucracy, but in fact led to a very similar room and a sense of déjà vu entrapment. The details indicated that this was a detective's office and that the detective had been tailing the artist. A post-it-note amongst surveillance photos and a record of library withdrawals simply asks 'who is Toby Lloyd?' Research on astral projection and Aleister Crowley suggested the detective thinks the artist is involved in the occult, or is even possessed.

Toby Phips Lloyd The Magic They Had Tried To Harness

Toby Phips Lloyd, The Magic They Had Tried To Harness Was Beginning, Instead, To Ride Them - Detective's office, 2012. MDF, wood, found objects, furniture, fabric, strip lights and carpet tiles. 250cm x 800cm x 850cm. Credit: James Sebright

On exiting the detective's room, we found ourselves back at the beginning. The installation's narrative is like the loop of psychoanalytic treatment in which, after a long detour, we return to our starting point from a different perspective. Around the back of the three-room installation Toby Lloyd interviewed Toby Phips Lloyd on video, allowing both alter egos to step outside and explore the narrative from another point of view. We were then confronted with the ultimate dénouement: a surveillance booth had all the while been observing us. The fact of seeing ourselves captured on screen provoked a destabilising, removed, out-of-body feeling. 

Toby Phips Lloyd, The Magic They Had Tried To Harness Was Beginning, Instead, To Ride Them - Detective's office, 2012. MDF, wood, found objects, furniture, fabric, strip lights and carpet tiles250cm x 800cm x 850cm. Credit: James Sebright

Selected by Katharine Welsh
Published December, 2012


About Katharine Welsh

Katharine Welsh joined the exhibitions team at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art in 2006. At BALTIC she has worked on exhibitions and projects in varying contexts, with both established and emerging artists including Mark Manders, Marcus Coates, Kader Attia, Bharti Kher, Jordan Baseman, Akram Zaatari, Tobias Putrih, Graham Hudson and David Blandy. She has also produced major commissions with artists including Candice Breitz, Vasco Araujo and Yoshitomo Nara + graf. She curated the first UK solo presentations of Mariko Mori, Barthélémy Toguo, Barry McGee, Kimsooja, Jesper Just and most recently Bojan Fajfric. She co-curated Turner Prize 2011 and her recent catalogue essays include texts on Sam Taylor-Wood, Sergiy Bratkov, Barthélémy Toguo, Adel Abidin, Hilary Lloyd and Karla Black.


Further information

tobyphipslloyd.co.uk
balticmill.com
ncl.ac.uk

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