Exhibition
Stuart Mayes - MOCA (London)
PLAY will be an interactive ‘video’ installation made up entirely of used VHS video tape taken from disused gay pornographic videos. Mayes will make a huge, minimal “wall” in the space that will bisect the room. Viewers will enter the museum and have to decide whether to penetrate the wall of free flowing tape or not. The curtain wall of black tape also alludes to the colourful plastic tape often seen at the doorways to many of Soho’s sex shops where such videos might be found. VHS tape is now no longer the cutting edge of entertainment technology (surpassed by DVDs, Blue Ray, downloading and even live web streaming) and like old records is now past its sell by date, opening itself up to new meanings and interpretations as well as being treated as physical material from which other things might be made.
