"Beginning through a novel premise: there is a figure who is bound by the theatrical stage".


Behind the scenes, this conceptual world concentrates Matthew Lloyd’s work as a drama that is cinematically alluring, albeit strangely inaccessible. As if witnessing a secret ceremony, a theatrical postmorton, a glimpse beyond the restricted cordon. The work, quarantined in action and indifferent to spectatorship, keeps the observer at a disconcerting separation yet without lessening the lure to stare, listen, and move more closely.

Lloyd’s work is a crime, and the stage, the scene of. Primarily due to how their theatre inhabits itself as an estranged site of exception. A moribund underworld whose framework is being ambiguously unsettled, wrapped by scripted severances. A chasm-theatre, turned prison, courtroom, lecture hall, and comedic stage, produces what has seemingly been collapsed (perhaps fallen from the outside world) and licensed its omissions to be excavated in a deficient play. All the while, the original caveat for such dramatic exceptions, the official announcement of violation, remains but a shadow looming throughout, fogging this theatrical universe as liminally indeterminate. Deceptive, dislocating acts are to be articulated as intervals, cuts that have become somewhat unmoored from their script, unclassified serial verisimilitudes narrowing the truth of the event with its edges of fiction. Here, we are reminded about the plight of representations of when our coordinations of what constitutes reality begin to rupture, become strange. In the vicinity of what should remain prohibited, excluded in our composed framework, we find ourselves confronting a vacancy, a pit, which emerges, rather returns, as the borders of the inconceivable start to fade. In this regard, paused at the verge of the Real, the work, the ‘crime’, remains in question, abiding into the interruption, the extralegal, the gap itself. 

Apropo to the philosophy of its maker, this theatre is a spoiled psychogeographic territory. An eerie maze of thinking, whereby fictional acts have inherited this incongruity and come into being. Eliciting semblances that have, allegedly speaking, emerged from actual, in-reality, catastrophes. Backdrops, theoretically soaked with barbarity, position bankrupt characters, discarded scenery, and vacuous props to frame the stage and act out: the ethical consequences of the unrepresentable; the autonomous struggle of the unspeakable; a subject's destitution to ground subjectivity; the aesthetic disavowal of a symbolic-order. And yet, what informs the work's unsettling choreography is the documentation of a scene's prohibitions. Initially, due to Lloyd’s performances lacking theatrical relief. When pieces, objects, and scenarios exist, literally out of place, fractured from their own set, they subsist as wary, uncustomary protagonists that dare our dramatic attention. Moreover, is how these abstruse vestiges of unseen dramas are lensed through the gaze of the disaffected, the director. Although seemingly protected by the symbolic curtain from confronting what cannot be fully penetrated, we, as undesirable witnesses, are radically beholden to watch through and as the subjectivity of an impresario, of which, in and of itself, is devoid and unidentifiable. 

Whilst an impounded actor of impersonal character is directed to perform somewhere between a subject of lack, a bodiless form, that of the living-dead. A subject under a declining subjectivity. Their backstory remains a blind spot, but whose markings of authorship remain at large, deeply absorbed by a tension that disrupts and preys on their selfhood. Such theatrical conflict between the figure and background is invariably staged as ontologically one. Being the subject-actor emerges, retreats and rests into, from, or as this dramatic cavity; neither property becomes fully swallowed. Absences, pieces, signs, clues hold on: a speechless body, an acousmatic voice, a blank signature, a censored statement, disembodied attire, an empty assembly of chairs. Here, the preservation of the whole of extinction is, again, incomplete, suspended from reaching its end, from ending its end. 

Off the record, outside this dramatic setting, Lloyd’s theatrocracy focuses when they are assigned being a misgiving author against their own (artist) self and work. In striving to establish their own laws between artist and artwork; doubling themselves as a subject of Other and being a subject-object to the spectacle; allowing haunting authorities to restructure identity and artistic obligations; adopting the position of a curator of an artist who creates, or more accurately, as a writer about a director who manufactures an actor to perform. Through a series of networked divorces, Lloyd takes a hard detachment from themselves for an earnest account on the artist condition. By placing the artist in custody and eliciting their actions to be probed. The subtext throughout their detention, where inauthenticity and alienation are virtues, discloses a critique on authority and authorship in the status of artist subjectivity and autonomy. An interrogation led by Lloyd to set up themselves, builds a case that charges how artists embrace and abandon responsibility, effect, and fidelity to a world they perished from, or towards, or are regretful of being associated with. This unexpected route into art’s theoretical foundations articulates this hermetic ivory-theatre, with no exits, trap doors and a revoked audience, as a radical grandstand in which the artist and their work is perturbed by itself.

Once extracted from its histrionic beginnings and detained for public inspection. In a reviewable setting, the exhibition in Lloyd’s universe operates inherently as a site of unfolding. As new information, a new testimony, leaked footage or another document becomes released and arrives in the spotlight. Explicitly interrupts the exhibition as a confidential scene of reproduction through a forensic narrative. Lloyd’s installations become suggestive of detectives recovering evidence from theatrical ruins and material disclosure to solicit leads, and public awareness. Held hostage with little plea, the gallery site succumbs to scenographic apparatuses that besiege and mourn the exhibition form. Engulfed by charcoal-toned curtains that shape private enclosures, subdued stage lighting reveals what otherwise remains in darkness; objects defended by vitrines and velour ropes offer an internal affair. Pieces of sets, unkneeling to the white cubes’ architectural respects, remain at their full-theatrical-scale, while concealed sounds of audience murmurs or fragments of a show’s score cross-contaminate between objects and artifacts.   

Unearthing this unclassified evidence within the exhibition system articulates the work quite inadmissible and illegible due to the proposition of being from the Other Scene, a private conception, so to speak. Reported as being torn from its original world now exiled into a new showcase, the work diverges from being automatically enlightened by the exhibition form and its prescribed public. In maintaining its theatrical spatial separations, by not allowing observers to get too close to the evidence. The work reassures a strange autonomy through disturbing the status between viewers of the objects. Locating its presence in a spectacle of ambiguous distance, all the while re-attaching itself to another foreign legislation. As the work’s admittance into public record, into the exhibition, arrives with avowed indications, markings of corruption and unease preservations about its origins. Tampered evidence without time periods, absence of biographical information, muted voices, disposed sets, redactions, and ransom notes, misleading posters, oddly coalesced testimonies, scripts, and contracts intrinsically swells with suspicion that revelatory information has been removed. The question, for whom, out of protection for the sovereign theatre, the unidentifiable director, the subject-actor, or the symbolic/actual audience, remains unclear. 

What is clear is that this trail of ML, wishes to retain a seclusion and dignity by such invalidness and exits. That just enough information can penetrate, that is, soak through, even if for good or ill, it stains. In this regard, once in the public's jury-eye, Lloyd’s acts can be better understood as ‘cutscenes’. Amputated pieces of a play, separated restricted files of internal conflicts and external denials, that, by its disclosure, undercuts, impoverishes the larger case at hand. If indeed there is ever one to be found. As the disassociated chain of evidence mounts and perverts itself. On the stand, the work forges an audience of sleuths into a deadlock over the cause of this incessant (in)subordination, along with its staged unease and false climaxes. But the dissensus this adheres to, denying witnesses complete access and exhibiting only that which corrupts and contempts its narratology. The work ultimately offers an unfamiliar, but intimate expression of how art might prefer to renounce itself towards aesthetic-legislators, the symbolic regime of the gallery, and subsequently, art’s constitution. 

In the end, Lloyd’s unstraightforward cross-examination is a show-case whose debt isn’t in performing for the white cube or black box, but elsewhere. A suspicious grey-zone, an autonomous locale that is sealed off by curtains, turned away from the world and into an untimely drama. Disquiet, this is where, as observers, Lloyd wants us to wait, like inmates awaiting for their cell. That beneath this unescorted portrait of an artist qua dramatist, qua actor, qua art, and back again. The subject-actor, once more, is getting ready to go on stage, commit to the clandestine and expect their final sentence.