{"id":86,"date":"2024-03-15T11:03:48","date_gmt":"2024-03-15T11:03:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/?p=86"},"modified":"2026-02-03T03:20:22","modified_gmt":"2026-02-03T03:20:22","slug":"mark-leckey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/?p=86","title":{"rendered":"Mark Leckey"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Parade<\/i>\u00a0by Mark Leckey (b. 1964, Birkenhead, UK) is a single-screen video and sound installation that immerses viewers in a surreal and unsettling exploration of style, subculture, and the image of the modern dandy. Commissioned for the Brighton Photo Biennial and shown at Fabrica alongside the exhibition\u00a0Make Life Beautiful! The Dandy in Photography<\/i>, the work acts as a meditation on decadence and metropolitan identity, refracted through a lens of hallucinatory desire and distorted sound.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At the heart of\u00a0Parade<\/i> is a claustrophobic narrative that resists clarity. It presents a solitary male figure adrift in a psychedelic, consumerist landscape\u2014a speculative imagining of what the dandy might look like in the near future, seduced and consumed by his surroundings. The sound design plays a crucial role in heightening the viewer\u2019s disorientation: a fractured, echoing repetition of the word \u201cPARADE\u201d becomes a hypnotic pulse, lending a sense of dread to the work\u2019s visual excess. The parade here is not celebratory\u2014it is feverish, obsessive, and inward-turning.<\/p>\n

Leckey is known for his fascination with youth culture, nostalgia, and the shifting boundary between personal memory and collective media history. In earlier works like\u00a0Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore<\/i>\u00a0and\u00a0Dream English Kid<\/i>, he manipulated found footage to create poetic, elegiac reflections on class, identity, and the social rituals of postwar Britain.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Parade<\/i>\u00a0continues this approach but moves into more ambiguous, speculative territory. It draws heavily on the aesthetics of fashion, music videos, and advertising, but refracts them into something darker\u2014something hovering between cultural homage and critique.<\/p>\n

What emerges is a portrait of a culture at once entranced and unmoored, where surface and style mask deeper anxieties. The dandy, traditionally a figure of elegance and self-possession, is here recast as isolated, entrapped, and caught in an endless loop of consumption. Leckey\u2019s work doesn\u2019t moralize, but it disturbs. It questions the narratives we build around identity and taste in an era saturated with images and sound.<\/p>\n

As with much of Leckey\u2019s practice,\u00a0Parade<\/i>\u00a0operates on multiple registers: it is historical and futuristic, personal and cultural, poetic and analytical. It is as much about the lineage of dandyism as it is about the fragmented nature of subjectivity in the digital age. Commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella in association with the Brighton Photo Biennial,\u00a0Parade<\/i>\u00a0exemplifies Leckey\u2019s ongoing commitment to making work that is as conceptually rich as it is viscerally affecting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Parade<\/em> is commissioned and produced by Film and Video Umbrella in association with the Brighton Photo Biennial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mark Leckey<\/p>\nRead More<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2694,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-projects","col-md-4 col-sm-6"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/keithwhittle.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/MarkLeckey.png?fit=672%2C448&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=86"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4514,"href":"https:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86\/revisions\/4514"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=86"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=86"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/keithwhittle.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=86"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}