Bands

Bands is the latest incarnation of a long-term project in which Blamey has collected thousands of used rubber bands with a view to better understanding how their performative application in routine situations can lead to an extraordinary array of physical expressions. In previous iterations he has projected these bands at a monumental scale and arranged them systematically in a vitrine. But here, nearly a hundred photographs are distributed across the pages of a large-scale book that resembles a half-empty travel guide. It is both astonishing that someone would undertake such a task and exhilarating to see the numerous ways in which a humble circle of elastic can warp, kink, torque, tangle, coil and knot in the process of being removed from its intended place of use. These spent loops are instinctively discardable – the lowest of the low – and yet, solicitously documented and arranged according to some mysterious scheme, they are elevated to a value equivalent to that of music or sculpture – or, at least, to something eminently worthwhile.