Jennet Thomas

Animal Condensed > Animal Expanded #1 stages a philosophical encounter between what are best described as two postanthropological agents who, in an attempt to reconcile themselves with the trauma of a mass biotechnoviolation, quiz one another on the origins and ontologies of their species. Set in a virtual black and white world where human and nonhuman identities are anything but, the overriding question here is less one of animal rights and more of how our new animal ‘wrongs’ might think, feel and communicate.

Originally commissioned by Grundy Art Gallery, The Unspeakable Freedom Device combines a number of interconnected multimedia and sculptural elements and paints a picture of an absurd primitive-future world populated by a cast of uncannily familiar characters. Its narrative shadows two women who wrestle with the fascination and threat of techno-totalitarian supremacy personified by the all-powerful Blue Lady. Thomas’ powerful portrayal is as formidable as the histories it prophesizes and its timely creation couldn’t be more fitting against the backdrop of today’s political unconscious.

School of Change is a 40 minute sci-fi musical film – an endless loop based in a distorted reality that satirically reflects on our own. Like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, we are led through a School day in the life of the New Girl. She is kidnapped into an alternate world in which mutations in the workings of reason itself are threatening the viability of humanity. As the new girl joins her class, an exact replica of her joins parallel sets of identical classes.

In the presentation at Matt's Gallery in 2012, the viewer walked through an expansive sculptural installation, in which motifs from the film were played out; giant diagrammatic stick figures in the warning colours of yellow and black tower over a school girl inhabiting the world of School of Change.

All Suffering SOON TO END! was inspired by a contemporary evangelical pamphlet. The pamphlet describes the ‘the end of days,’ and is both tender and lyrical in part, then savagely violent and ridiculous.

At Matt's Gallery in 2010, Thomas reconstructed the space into two interconnecting chambers. The first was the Dark Chamber in which a 30 minute film played continuously. Escalating into a series of surprising and rhythmic variations, the film depicts a number of elaborate parallel worlds which become increasingly absurd and disturbing.

The second Purple Chamber entered only through the first, houses a further alternate world, theatrically enclosed in purple tickertape tinsel. Key motifs depicted in the film are exaggerated and distorted — as if by centuries of mistranslation—into sculptural and sound installations, inhabited on occasion by performative presences.

JENNET THOMAS’s film A Tale I Know Nothing About features themes of resurrection, entertainment and death. Inspired by the fantastical Neo-Egyptian Art Deco cinema on Essex Road, once a bingo hall, Thomas weaves a visual poem of pigeon-gods, roving eyeballs, and a dead policeman through animated verses of a Dada-esque nonsense rhyme – a mysterious folk memory that has passed through generations of London playgrounds.