Art
FreeCharlie Woolley: Lone Soul Road
Charlie Woolley’s exhibition considers cultural themes and aesthetics relating to motorcycle counter-culture. This continues his investigations into subcultural production in an age of avatars and fluid digital identity.
In recent years subcultural imagery has undergone an intensive shift. Certain iconographies and signifiers once considered criminal or subterranean have now become common-place and readily available. Similarly, identities that once upon a time may have taken a lifetime to earn can now, in the form of the avatar, be taken on, inhabited, discarded and replaced indefinitely. The digital offers the Art ability to become, instantly. This creates a state of flux and provides opportunities for deviation from homogenous archetypes (subcultures are, as media theorist Dick Hebdige described in 1979, merely the darker side of these archetypes).
Lone Soul Road is a film installation in which Woolley utilises the iconic and once ‘hard-earned’ badge of the outlaw biker to pose an overarching question about the authenticity of traditional counter-cultural space. Has counter-culture really been entirely subsumed by commerce and was its existence ‘outside’ of capital merely a fantastical mirage?
