Artist: Richard Bowers

Barricade is an installation-opera featuring correspondence, drama, film scripts, poetry, diaries, and other historical data to unfold a freeform account of European history. This network of written exchanges draws relationships between fragments of Western culture, forging the raw materials to feed this collision of opera and cinema - two grandiose art forms that can support the weight of historical subjects. This work undermines that grandiosity through its nonchalance, playing fast and loose with historical methods; a view across a desert strewn with half-exposed fragments and ruins.

In Barricade, songs emerge from a film actor's mouth. The singer’s voice (Grace Curtis) is trapped and suspended in time, fated to fill the space of the Walcot Chapel with a ghost-like presence. The opera’s meaning comes not from the sung words but from a network of correspondence littering the landscape of North American and European culture in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Richard Bowers is an artist whose work is centered upon the use of computer technology so that installations and video works are animated with an element of chance. The aim is to produce works that are non-repeatable; works that carry a sense of the organic.