Recent Works
Works that are available can be aquired via Gertrude or contact us directly.
On Loan, Acrylic on MDF, found VHS Tapes, found objects, 2025
Film stills from ‘Coming Soon’, looping video on 180 min VHS tape, (Displayed on a CRT TV AND VCR) 2025
-- There is a short text on this piece below --
Installation Shot.
Image Credit: Fanatic, g39, 2025
‘Hidden Agenda’, Found VHS tape acquired from eBay seller retrocollector2023, based in Stroud, 2025
Image Credit: Fanatic, g39, 2025
Currently on Show in Fanatic at g39, Cardiff til 14th June 2025
Roxy Topia and Paddy Gould's work has been heavily influenced by pulp film and low budget cinema. Their recent research into Astrovision, a video rental shop in Gloucestershire in the mid 80's where Roxy's nan used to work has become a kind of MacGuffin for questions about memory, representation, nostalgia and physical media.
-- ‘Coming Soon’ --
This work uses photographs taken with our phones whilst watching movies. Sequencing them together and limiting further intervention to transitions between images and the movement available through panning and zooming inside a single image.
They are edited digitally and outputted back onto old video tapes for playback. Happily embracing the age and degradation of the medium of VHS, as well as the aesthetics gathered through their functional transfer between mediums.
The images themselves started out capturing glimpses of artworks in the background. But that expands gently to accommodate wider questions of where art objects fold into the process of making films.
It is an open work whose images are gathered by the vagaries of our day to day attention and sequenced by an organisational logic that blooms from the visual possibilities created when the images are pulled out of their films.
It is a piece without resolution, and could easily be continued as we watch more films. In fact it could simply be re-edited from what we already have to reflect a different path through the material. It holds open questions of agency and art; mediation, meaning making and organisational logic; looking back and expectancy; as well as pondering contemporary art’s location in today’s incessant flow of media, and how it got here.
As with some of our other work, it enacts a human centred version of a logic we see played out by technology in the world around us. With its similarities to the automated ‘memories’ slideshows, concocted by our phones and home video trailer reels promoting a distributors other titles. Perhaps we are pondering where exactly art can find a future in this contemporary world overwhelmed as it is with immanence and flow.
