In a bold and brilliant curatorial move, London's Studio Voltaire has orchestrated a stunning visual conversation between two of Britain's most distinctive artistic voices. 'Very High Frequency' pairs the late, great television playwright Dennis Potter with the acclaimed contemporary artist Hilary Lloyd, creating an electrifying dialogue that crackles across the decades.
The exhibition is far from a simple side-by-side display; it is a deeply integrated, thoughtful curation that finds startling resonances between Potter's groundbreaking television work and Lloyd's sculptural video installations. Both artists, in their own eras, have masterfully dissected the relationship between the human body and the technologies that capture and broadcast it.
A Dialogue Across Time
Walking through the gallery, visitors are treated to a sensory feast. Excerpts from Potter's legendary works, including The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven, are projected alongside Lloyd's mesmerising multi-screen installations. The show reveals a shared obsession with how technology—from the television camera to the digital monitor—filters, fragments, and re-presents human experience.
Lloyd's work, known for its hypnotic, close-up focus on mundane objects and gestures, finds a perfect partner in Potter's surreal and often painful narratives where characters burst into song, breaking the confines of their own reality. The exhibition highlights how both use repetition, popular culture, and a disrupted narrative flow to probe beneath the surface of everyday life.
More Than a Retrospective
This is not a tribute act. The power of 'Very High Frequency' lies in its refusal to treat Potter as a relic. Instead, it positions him as a vital, contemporary voice whose experiments with form and content are directly relevant to today's media-saturated world. Lloyd's presence confirms this, demonstrating how the questions Potter raised about authenticity, performance, and voyeurism are more pressing than ever in the age of social media and on-demand streaming.
The installation at Studio Voltaire is itself a work of art. Screens are mounted on custom-built structures, cables are exposed, and the entire space hums with the energy of transmission and reception. It is an environment that perfectly embodies its theme: we are inside the machine, seeing how the signals are made.
'Very High Frequency' is a must-see for anyone interested in the crossroads of art, media, and technology. It is a challenging, exhilarating, and ultimately moving experience that proves great art never goes out of range—it just waits for the right frequency to be heard again.
