Description:Q5112
The Golden Space City of God, Richard Grayson’s third exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, is a large-scale video installation with sound featuring a new choral work performed by a 26-piece choir. Within the gallery, theatre drapes and plastic stacking chairs give the impression of a space linked to community expression and exchange – a church or community hall – that speaks of the formation of group identities and ideas of improvement and aspiration.
The Golden Space City of God score was composed by Leo Chadburn based on a libretto by the artist – which appears as subtitles in the video work – abstracted from a website associated with The Family, a community that developed from the 1960s cult Children of God. It is based upon texts that give a detailed prediction of events leading up to the end of the world, drawn from the Book of Revelation and re-imagined through the languages and imagery of science fiction. They describe the widespread economic and social unrest that will spread across the globe following an oil crisis and the collapse of dollar-based economies. Out of this chaos a world leader emerges, assisted by UFOs, who establishes a worldwide government through his use of credit and barcode technologies, pin numbers, UNESCO and the European Economic Community…
He builds a giant robot and Capitalism is abolished; Jesus returns to Earth to fight against his empire and establish a kingdom of the saved; A thousand years pass where survivors live in an ideal society based on an agrarian economy of exchange, and the elect – who have been given new supernatural indestructible bodies – rule over the rest of humankind, using the power of invisibility to police them effectively; The masses rise again only to be defeated by fire and plague and God descends in the biggest space ship ever built, the Golden Space City, to take the elect away to explore and colonise new planets and galaxies…
The Golden Space City of God was filmed at Say Si in San Antonio, Texas on Saturday 14 March 2009 has been commissioned and produced by Artspace, San Antonio and Matt’s Gallery, London.