For a composer who believes, according to the gallery’s note, that music constitutes identity, Bailey hardly cares about sound. The bassy backing of 5C Jacques Road, an overlong video record of a car journey around Kingston, is as drab as it is repetitive.
But — and this is perverse in a video installation — she cares even less for the image. The town, sea, and forest scenes shot from the passenger’s seat are inconsequential. Bailey pairs the sequences with quasi-poetic subtitles: “You might hear a gabby sound”, “Why am I so concerned that I be able to feel anything at all”. The passages correspond to no speaker.
Taking the artist’s mission as activist consciousness-raiser in earnest, one might read Bailey’s unstoppable dub as the memory of a distant childhood. Whom does it rally, however, when the project makes no aesthetic claim on the gallery? Music, if that’s what’s on offer, turns into a commodity of an entirely projected culture. Without the gallery’s lush sofas, no one would stop to hear it.
