L*a*b

L*a*b
Two Channel HD video, 2016, 12 mins

[...]

To my cousins,
a wild combination.
Drank in by love of each other,
under my bosom.
Burning for the lightning.

To my colours,
I am to be a flash
of shining
front teeth

[...]

L*a*b is set in a dark room, a bedroom. Actually it’s a small shitty bedsit, which folds out into an any-which-way-room: a study, a kitchen, a dining room and a boudoir. The room is shared between a couple of guys, who to a greater or lesser degree love each other. The space is imaginary. The action takes place in the middle of the night, a particular kind of moment that affords the collapse of the past and the future into an immediate intensity drawing together and swallowing up subjecthood, objecthood (and anything in between) into a blackhole moment. The kind of moment in which nothing is more important than the thing one is looking at, even if the thing is masked in darkness or delirium. From such a vantage point, one is not only in the moment, one is the moment: A paranoid self-destructive semi-conscious fantasy. A drunken negotiation of an intimately familiar group of objects. Being in love.

A: Eddie Peake
B: Andy Lacey
L: Paul Simon Richards & June Miles-Kingston

Special thanks to:

Ralph Alvarez, Claire Hooper, Riikka Laulainen, Dan Margulis, Simon Mawby, Mark Aerial Waller, Joseph Walsh

With support from the Elephant Trust and Arts Council England

• http://paulsimonrichards.com/works/lab-/