Text by CLOT Magazine
This summer Goldsmiths Centre of Contemporary Arts features several new projects for Episodes – an ongoing series of solo shows that run alongside and starkly contrast the main exhibitions. Ranging across a variety of media and events, the purpose of Episodes is to create a platform for new artistic practices by allowing emerging creatives to experiment, innovate, and have their voices heard. The 2019 programme includes Adam Christensen’s I’m Not Done With You Yet, exploring New York’s Disco culture of the seventies, Roland Carline’s project consisting of a film and a series of performances, and Corey Hayman’s Plastic Sounds of Dark Matter.
Corey Hayman, a Goldsmiths University alumnus, is a London-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores ethnic and societal identities. Working in various media, from film and photography to sculpture, drawing, and documentation, Hayman draws on personal experiences with issues of ethnicity, sex, and class and their role in the current social, political, and economic climate. Her work aims to form bonds between diverse materials to investigate Afro-pessimism, the ‘hauntology of blackness’, and the ideas of progress and capitalism.
Hayman’s installation Plastic Sounds of Dark Matter, consists of various audio systems carefully placed around the space to examine the infrastructure of sound. She reflects on the aestheticisation of politics and opposition and tackles the tension between ethnicity and capitalism through the responses of a kid’s TV character Rastamouse. Hayman’s recurring theme, she views Rastamouse as a black character, a talking commodity entangled in the web of racial representation, consumerism, and entertainment. Hayman explores the reasons for Rastamouse’s existence by considering the past and the systems that have changed throughout history and shaped blackness.
Plastic Sounds of Dark Matter runs between July 17 and August 11, 2019, at Goldsmiths CCA, London.
