Video, sound, writing, performance and radio broadcast—the core of Aled Simons' practice explores anecdote, personal mythology, pseudo-scientific ritual and humour. Often looping or repetitive: gifs and crude 3D animation, 1990s television and its specific place at a shift between analogue broadcast and digital on-demand viewing. The work occupies a space between the tension release of a laugh and the awkwardness of things that go on too long or fall flat and fail. 

 

An attempt to preserve a skewed legacy of humankind, a mass of debris collected at the shoreline after the catastrophic wave has washed away most of what we once knew or half-remember. Re-interpreting or misunderstanding the idea of an heirloom—a virtual keepsake. He confesses that he sometimes scares himself by imagining a digital apocalypse where everything important to him on the internet is wiped out.

 

Past, present and future all at once. Performative whims born of misinterpreted superstition and sham witchcraft, and impulse that becomes compulsion—all filtered through a childhood dressing-up box, this is Aled Simons’ practice. Lost and forgotten photographs recreated from memory, a homemade Hulk Hogan costume from 1991. Totems and souvenirs. Imagine a drumroll that goes on forever, the joke gets old fast, like a fanfare for an event that may never happen, or that is happening over and over and over again. A dream in which you strip naked in the living room of your grandparent’s council house. You are nude, jumping from armchair to settee, then from settee back to armchair singing Lady in Red by Chris De Burgh, this is also Aled Simons’ practice.