Neo-Mortalism
Some knots are tied slowly.

ALASTAIR LAAS


Text
Newsletter
Editions *Soon*
Merch
Contact


Collections
+ El Gallo
+ Global Citizen
+ ANCPT
+ Omniipresent

 Works
+ Hold On To Me
+ You Must Be
+ Raw Hide
+ Material Memory II
+ Bruxism
+ Dethrone [Lazy Boy]
+ Sado
+ Dogs Body II
+ The Quick & The Dead
+ Caught Up
+ Walk A Mile
+ CondemNation
+ Ciracade
+ Slightly Smiling Face, Disappointed Face, Face Without Mouth
+ Total Auribus Teneo Lupum
+ Vegan Between Meals


CV

Instagram
Collecteurs
Foundwork











      Slightly Smiling Face, Disappointed Face, Face Without Mouth - triptych (2018)

      Polyethylene peg boards
      21 x 31 x 1 cm

      *SOLD*             Every message begins as a feeling. But by the time it reaches its destination, it has already become a system.

      In this work, emotion appears not as a face, not as an expression, but as a line of code; the cold architecture beneath every warm gesture. A smile, a sigh, a silence, each one flattened into a hexadecimal, processed and packaged notification.

      What we send across the world is never the feeling itself,
      only its residue, a clinical notation masquerading as intimacy.

      This triptych reveals the truth beneath our digital tenderness: even our love is just consumable data.
      View In Full












      Exhibition view: Show One, Lethaby Gallery, King’s Cross, London.




      Ciracade (2018)


      Mild steel, LED strip, Medium Density Fibre Board, perspex, injection moulded polyurethane, 3x Arduino Uno boards, servos, black ink, Chinese Wolf hair brushes, 130 x 130 x 26cm

      *Recipient of the David Ward International Award for Innovation and shortlisted for Aesthetica Art Prize

      *Unavailable      Ciracade is an analogous structure formed allegorically, preserving the principles of a self-contained organisation that governs light and mobility, providing a schema for the automation and commodification of emotion.

      Mirroring Bourriaud's concerns, written in 'The Exform', that the 'proletariat' may be becoming dissociated. Here, Ciracade attempts to form a microcosm of industry, exhibiting a mechanised interpretation of Schadenfreude ('malicious joy' at the expense of another), in lieu of an under-class driven labour system purposed exclusively for capital gain. 

      The peripheral light ring is automated by a smartphone app, changing to affect the internal-body clock of viewing parties. This unspoken procedural system invites discourse around appointed capitalist frameworks whose purpose is to maintain enterprise at any cost.


      View In Full










      CondemNation (2018)


      LED Digital Display

      Exhibition view: (H)AKT, Ugly Duck, Bermondsey, London.             A child’s game is easy to follow; a philosopher’s command is not. CondemNation collapses “Simon Says” into “Sartre Says,” turning existential thought into a glowing instruction on a departure-board display. The shift reveals how quickly innocence can be steered, how authority slips into play, and how systems of control begin long before we recognise them.

      Made alongside my Master’s thesis, the work both studies and sabotages the philosophical frameworks it draws from, reducing existential gravity to a simple prompt in a darkened room, where obedience becomes the joke and the warning. 

      Make An Offer

      View In Full