Tamsin Snow: Selection of films and commissioned text by Aidan Wall
28 October 2020
To mark the original date of Tamsin Snow’s exhibition, Temple Bar Gallery + Studios is pleased to host several CGI films by the artist with a new responsive visual essay by Aidan Wall.
These three films, made in recent years, communicate ideas of control and restriction related to the corporate mindset of medical and cosmetic pharmaceutical companies. In Snow’s simulated hospitals, mortuaries, laboratories, and museums we experience stark sanitisation of death, separated from the everyday reality of loss and grief. When access to healthcare is a privileged commodification, these facilities become a living nightmare, perhaps all the more graspable considering our current experiences with contagion and isolation. Snow’s works examine the interchangeability between IRL technological advancement and science fiction, as we stand on the threshold of a future where life is preserved and engineered beyond our terminal corporeality.
Autopsy, a collaboration with partyTime.jpeg, was commissioned by Buried zine and included as a downloadable VR experience in Buried Six, 2017, with soundtrack by Victor Jakeman and Patrick Moran. Spare Face was produced for Snow’s solo exhibition at Block 336, 2018. Showroom was exhibited in the Temple Bar Gallery + Studios Atrium, 2018.
Knee Deep in the Dread
Aidan Wall has produced a visual essay, Knee Deep in the Dread, in response to Tamsin Snow’s work. Their essay draws from the eerie, claustrophobic and oppressive corridors that link Snow’s CGI films to the transitional spaces designed to build tension and horror in video games such as DOOM (id Software, 1993), P.T. (Kojima Productions, 2014), and Control (Remedy Entertainment, 2019), as well as Mark Fisher’s essay ’The Weird and the Eerie’, 2017 and Stanley Kubrick’s ‘The Shining’, 1980.
Tamsin Snow’s exhibition at Temple Bar Gallery + Studios will now take place in Autumn 2021, and will be her first solo exhibition in Ireland. Her previous solo exhibitions include Like, Flesh, AtelierFrankfurt (2019), Spare Face, Block 336, London (2018), and three collaborative solo exhibitions with Sarah Tynan at Mermaid Arts Centre, Bray (2017), Oonagh Young Gallery, Dublin (2014-2015), Store, London (2014). Snow and Tynan were selected for the Converse x Dazed Emerging Artists Award, Royal Academy, London (2015).
Aidan Wall is an artist, writer, musician, and game designer from Dublin who lives in Amsterdam. They finished a Master's Degree in Critical Studies at the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam in 2019, where they were a research fellow. Aidan runs the small press Rotted Cavern, which focuses on odd tales, essayistic glimpses, and thoughtful tabletop experiences. Their most recent publication Their Boolean Drift is a work of fiction about humanity’s relationship to two para-human entities: artificial intelligences and landlords.
Buried is a metal Fanzine that rejects Xerox zine aesthetics to deliver something akin to a bound and illuminated medieval manuscript. Issue seven of Buried will be available from Dublin Art Book Fair, and a compendium edition including all content from issues 1-6 will be published soon.