Artist Statement: People Like Us

Photo credit: Polly Brown

Since 1991 British artist Vicki Bennett has been working across the field of audio-visual collage, repurposing pre-existing footage to craft audio and video collages with an equally dark and witty take on popular culture. She sees collage as folk art sourced from the palette of contemporary media and technology, with all of the sharing and cross-referencing incumbent to a populist form. Using collage as a compositional tool, Vicki Bennett opens up endless opportunities to experience results that are more than the sum of the parts.  Embedded in her work is the premise that all is interconnected and that claiming ownership of an “original” or isolated concept is both preposterous and redundant. 

In 2006 she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive. People Like Us have previously shown work at Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery, The Barbican, Centro de Cultura Digital, V&A, Sydney Opera House, Royal Albert Hall, Pompidou Centre, Venice Biennale, Maxxi and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It. The ongoing sound art radio show ‘DO or DIY’ on WFMU has had over a million “listen again” downloads. since 2003. The People Like Us back catalogue is available for free download hosted by UbuWeb.

ALL COMMISSION ENQUIRIES OR BOOKINGS FOR GONE, GONE BEYOND ARE TO BE DONE DIRECTLY WITH US THROUGH OUR CONTACT PAGE.

Longer Biography
Filmography
Exhibitions and Editions
Selected Performances and Screenings
Commissions and Awards
People Like Us on bandcamp
People Like Us on Patreon
Discography

Photo credit: Polly Brown

Exhibitions and Editions

ALL COMMISSION ENQUIRIES OR BOOKINGS FOR GONE, GONE BEYOND ARE TO BE MADE DIRECTLY WITH US THROUGH OUR CONTACT PAGE.

To date, People Like Us/Vicki has had 6 solo exhibitions and participated in over 20 group shows including at MAXXI (Rome), HMKV (Dortmund), Centro de Cultura Digital (Mexico), Hatton Gallery (Newcastle), Vitrine (London), alt.gallery (Newcastle), Greene County Council for the Arts Gallery (NY), Peacock Visual Arts (Aberdeen), Kunstmuseum (Magdeburg), Pallant House (Chichester), Engramme (Quebec), La Scatola Gallery (London), Changing Room (Stirling), Franklin Street Works (Connecticut), Usurp Gallery (London), University of Greenwich Galleries, Matthew Gallery (Dundee), Edinburgh Printmakers, Millennium Gallery (Sheffield) Leeds College of Art, Sunbeam Studios (London) and Sheehan Gallery, Walla Walla.

Also featured in Sounds Like Silence – 4’33’’ Silence Today (Spectre Books 2012), The Journal of Writing In Creative Practice (Vol 7 Issue 1 2015), The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Design by Tony Gibbs (Ava Publishing 2007), Cutting Across Media by Kembrew McLeod (Duke University Press 2011), Here To Go – Art, Counter-Culture and the Esoteric (Forum Nidrosiae 2014), Incredible Machines by Danny Snelson (avant 2014), writing for The Wire’s Collateral Damage (February 2012) and a whole chapter in Duchamp Is My Lawyer The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb by Kenneth Goldsmith on Columbia University Press (2020) and a chapter in Different People – Conversations on Art, Life and the Creative Process by Carl Abrahamsson on Trapart (2021).

.For gallery concerts and festival film screenings please also see Selected Performances and Screenings

Continue reading “Exhibitions and Editions”

People Like Us – Exhibited at Maxxi in Rome

People Like Us are currently exhibiting at Maxxi gallery in Rome. It includes a 20 minute screening of a previous People Like Us live a/v set entitled “Live Excerpts“, and also in the gallery space there is a monitor showing/airing People Like Us downloads from UbuWeb, and the video “The Sound of the End of Music“.
The exhibition is called Expanded Video.

EXPANDED VIDEO
21 April – 5 June 2011
curated by Anne Palopoli and Oscar Pizzo

Expanded Video presents an Italian preview of a number of video works and live performances by Jacob TV, Masbedo, Martha Colburn and People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett). 
Organized in collaboration with the Music for Rome Foundation, the series arises from the confrontation and interaction between different forms of creativity that define a common idiom in which listening and seeing become analogous and equivalent episodes. 
The works of the selected artists, in which the diverse idioms fuse and integrate perfectly, are linked by a shared emancipation from the ties and conventions of the individual media. Sound becomes narration and the image dissolves in an ever-different rhythm.




EXHIBITING:
MAXXI, Gallery 5

Masbedo

Theorem of incompletion, 2008
5’38” – Music by Lagash, Borgar Magnason – editing Giuseppe Domingo Romano for Except s.r.l. – courtesy Noire Contemporary Art
Masbedo’s work stages the difficulties underlying the relationship between man and woman and the consequent destruction of intimacy: pieces of glass abandoned on a table in a desolate Icelandic landscape are destroyed by shouts and gunfire. Filmed in Iceland, a location in which the limits are tangible, the work tackles the theme of the conditioning to which man is subjected in contemporary society.

Jacob TV
THE NEWS, a reality opera, 2011 in progress
17′ circa – Jan Boiten, videos, scenography; Kristen Kerstens, videos – Courtesy Jacob TV
The News is the latest work by the Dutch musician that will be presented at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2012. At MAXXI Jacob Tv presents a preview of a selection from this opera in which images taken from the media are deconstructed and reconstructed with a syncopated rhythm.

Martha Colburn
Dolls VS Dictators, 2010
11′ – Musica/music composed by Greg Saunier (of Deerhoof) and foley sound by Michael Evans – courtesy Martha Colburn
In this video Martha Colburn stages the killing of a number of dictators from history. Thanks to the stop-motion technique, dolls and puppets traverse a fantastic landscape causing the spectator to fall into a surreal world in which the laws that inform reality are overturned.

Cosmetic Emergency, 2005
8′ – Musica/Music Jad Fair, Mick Hobbs, Hilary Jeffery, Coco Solid – courtesy Martha Colburn
Cosmetic Emergency focuses on contemporary society’s obsession with appearance. The idea of beauty is analysed through the presentation of images taken from current affairs and old films, paintings and documentaries. In a collage of sounds and representations the video investigates the motivations that push contemporary society in this direction.

People Like Us/Vicki Bennett

Live Excerpts, 2002-2007
16’27” – courtesy Vicki Bennett
People like us assembles scenes and sound familiar to us from films, documentaries and archive images in a sequence the breaks up the linear cinematographic narration. This work brings together five live tracks of significance from the British musician’s output.

The programme also included a live performance of Genre Collage at Auditorium of Rome.
24 May, 21.00
People Like Us – GENRE COLLAGE
Auditorium Parco Della Musica, Teatro Studio


Download more info:
Maxxi website 1
Maxxi website 2
Expanded Video exhibition info pdf
About Genre Collage
About Genre Collage 2