Richard Sides

Richard Sides’ exhibition The Matrix, already names the exhibition space in its title as an unmarked, re-editable structure. In this expansive installation, Sides redefines the architectural conditions of Schiefe Zähne’s space entirely from floor to ceiling. The Matrix consists of structural intervention, mural, video, sculpture and collage.

The height of the space is lowered by a suspended ceiling installed by the artist to a height of 250 cm; this new level consists of newspaper, which allows the neon light installed above it to penetrate only diffusely into the exhibition space. On the gallery walls Sides paints a mural consisting of a series of vertical stripes in a wide variety of blue hues stretching across existing walls as well as a new wall thus spatially restructuring the gallery.

Some of the images and collages shown mirror the murals’ pattern. On them, individual pages from magazines appear to date from the 1960s and subsequent decades are collaged together. Images of familial interaction, and among other things, groups of people in shared ecstasy.

Suspended at an impossible angle is a sculpture in the form of Boston Dynamics’ recently completed Robot Dog ‘Spot’. Sides builds the dog as though it were a puppet with hinged limbs and assembles its body with the simplest means - pizza boxes and DHL packaging. Hanging on the wall, it may be in a malevolent stand-by mode. This ‘creature’ seems to have sprung from a dystopian fantasy. Spot has already been seen wandering through parks in real-life, ensuring compli- ance with pandemic rules as well as assisting the New York Police Department in street operations on a test basis; and almost inevitably - it is being used in the military sector.

This adaptive AI robot is in its terse design perhaps, the most direct reference to the 1999 film ‘The Matrix’, in which a man-made technology takes over and subjugates its own creators. A reference could also be derived from the giant Superman Exctasy pill that would enable an entire army to have a love orgy.

In an anachronistic way, different timelines overlap in the space. The viewers sense of time may now be completely lost. However, many of the objects and stagings are far from being committed to the idea of a complete illusion. On the con- trary, the objects and installations are mostly comprehensibly handmade, making use of generally accessible everyday objects such as pizza boxes, newspaper, concrete, and so on.

Sides eschews making specific moral critiques rather, the artist reproduces variants of stories we tell ourselves about our own existence, which in the process become our substance, and also seem to foreshadow the future direction of techni- cal development and social relations. Discarded printers and scanners also exhibited in the room, found on the street, could be understood as a cue for such a reading.