Laugh/Cry

2015
Audio Installation


6 channel loud speaker system

Images: © Mark Blower

Laugh/Cry is an audio in which a single voice occupies a set of six speakers scattered on a gallery floor. Repeating a pair of imperative phrases that reframe each other as they occur – “Laugh Your Head Off” and “Cry Your Eyes Out”Laugh/Cry confronts the viewer with seemingly opposed instructions, conjuring a contradictory presence from the meeting of ephemeral vocalisation and the concrete objects of speakers, amplifiers and wires.

The voice in Laugh/Cry is both disembodied and, at the same time, firmly located in the materiality of speakers and wires which substantially create, make place for, and frame the work. Etchells’ repeated, re-spoken and re-made phrases meanwhile also become strangely concrete language-objects through the work, which summons identity and fictitious presence in its simple procedure of repeating and remixing.