Phil Coy | Substance – A whole history of hollows and reliefs
Phil Coy’s practice includes films, sculpture, architectural installations, sound, text, photography and performance that collage concepts rooted in the radical art and literature of the 20th century, with the languages and architectures of global commerce.
Substance explores the materials and processes that enable us to image the earth’s surface, and reveals the scars that the extraction of these materials have left. The work focuses particularly on the mining and refining of copper, the process of photolithography used in the production of silicon chips, and the CCD (charge-coupled device) sensors found in most digital and satellite cameras.
It takes the form of a dymaxion world projection onto photo-etched copper plates – a dymaxion map being a 2D representation of the world with its form heavily interrupted in order to preserve shapes and sizes. Alongside, a Virtual Reality (VR) environment proposes a journey through these hollowed-out landscapes. In so doing the work offers the viewer an experience where both the medium and subject of observation merge.