Eight Days a Week, Nu Facts Emerge

Dave Allen believes and trusts in the power of the story even if, before he presents it to us, he has a way of twisting and turning history and memory on its head and more than often by 180 degrees. It’s not a gimmick or style, its a conscious and honest interest in understanding our surroundings, common expressions and collective past. Allen asks us to use all our senses when experiencing his work. Whenever he present us with an image - sound is present and when presenting us with sound - an image is present.

As Allen recently described in a studio visit ”…what’s there? What should be there? I’m trying to join up the dots. Attempting to get to grips with, and understand, a sort of more engaged methodology of playing, listening, viewing and processing.”

In the new work Nu Facts Emerge, 2019 a video projection fills the first room in the gallery. We literally walk straight into the story. After listening to a few of the stories a pattern emerges of a memory or the the idea of a memory, a story. A person getting up to change the vinyl record, stumbling, and instead of a new record he accidentally places his Take Away Fish & Chips on the turntable, and carries on to fall through a glass door, into the neighbours garden. For the film, Allen has asked friends and colleagues to tell their version of what happened or might have happened. 

How is history mediated today in relation to past times, and what grounds our sense of history in search of credible facts and knowledge? The Fish & Chips ending up on the turntable, actually happened, but is the starting point of another set of works in the show. Eight Days a Week, 2019 a series of eight photo collages of Technics turntables and Findus' Dagens Lunch meals. Eight Days a Week stresses the confusion and every day struggle to fit in the dream and/or lunch. The two works bounce off each others’ fiction and factuality. 

Here's another scenario; "you've listened to near on 16 minutes of howling feedback hell and then suddenly and without warning it ceases. There is silence, a kind of silence. Maybe you had your eyes closed, you open them. You get up from your comfortable seat and move to the record player. You pick up the stylus and place it in its holder. You then pick up the record, flip it over and replace the stylus at the start of the record. You sit back down again and close your eyes.

”In MMM + 1/MMM, 2019 we see a copy of Lou Reed´s infamous double album Metal Machine Music next to an epoxy cast of the album. The cast could be considered as a postscript to Lou Reed’s album, referring to the inevitable pauses, the gaps experienced in playing the album. Those that occur between sides A and B and C and D.

The large painting, Girl_Lord_Ford, 2017/19 may be a proposal for a monumental neon sign that more than likely is never meant to be made. Painted in acrylic on paper, it's a play with letters, a reordering carrying a subtle rhythm and rhyme; GIRL, GIRD, BIRD, BARD, LARD, LORD, FORD. Allen engages Lewis Carrol's doublet word-game to paraphrase and decode the lyrical skills of Jackson Browne and Glenn Frey. 

In order to see, read and listen to the work on display, we need to keep an open mind to references and senses. Allen deliberately deconstructs movements, personal memories and cultural experiences. It can be a piece of music or an examination of the way we consume and consciously or unconsciously assimilate stories and common memories into our own. Repetition is a central motif in Allen's work and key to his artistic practice. In repetition elements shift bit by bit and new histories are being told, all year round, eight days a week, nu facts emerge. 

Ola Gustafsson
Stockholm November 2019