Ralph Overill
It will stand forever, 2026
Photopolymer
Unframed: 19 x 29 cm
Framed: 33 x 43 x 1 cm
Framed: 33 x 43 x 1 cm
Edition of 12
This work is available to view online or by request. This work is priced unframed, please enqiure for framing options. Changing Ideas Award 'It will stand forever' (2026) is a...
This work is available to view online or by request.
This work is priced unframed, please enqiure for framing options.
Changing Ideas Award
"It will stand forever" (2026) is a print that documents a performance undertaken by the artist on location at Prince Albert’s Cairn, Balmoral. It involves the artist dressed in a science fiction costume as a lone robotic figure – a Cyberman – kneeling before the ancient and colossal pyramid, aiming to create an intriguing scene of temporal displacement and melancholy.
While the image welcomes viewers to form their own interpretations of this intervention, the artist’s motivations and concerns which sparked its creation are rooted in his disillusionment at the late-stage capitalist society in which he worries we are trapped. At the mercy of faceless financial markets and unaccountably over-complex systems, we seem enslaved by an income-creating algorithm, in which progressively less preside over increasingly more: the calculating cruelness of the global wealth pyramid. Seen across Scotland in the ever-growing divide between wealth and poverty, and the shameful recent 400% rent hikes on Glasgow’s Trongate 103 cultural hub, the increasing lack of empathy and philanthropy evident in those with power, leads the artist to imagine the ‘best’ of us evolving into cold, commodified, profit pursuing machines. Ultimately, the artist envisages the scenario, that when this world is spent and done, one sole robot will bow before the financial deity which has bestowed all the riches and power upon it. But at what cost?
With this loose science fiction narrative, the artist hopes to provoke thought and critique around what contemporary society values, questioning our deep-established late-capitalist way of life and the toll it takes on the environment, our culture, and our humanity.
This work is priced unframed, please enqiure for framing options.
Changing Ideas Award
"It will stand forever" (2026) is a print that documents a performance undertaken by the artist on location at Prince Albert’s Cairn, Balmoral. It involves the artist dressed in a science fiction costume as a lone robotic figure – a Cyberman – kneeling before the ancient and colossal pyramid, aiming to create an intriguing scene of temporal displacement and melancholy.
While the image welcomes viewers to form their own interpretations of this intervention, the artist’s motivations and concerns which sparked its creation are rooted in his disillusionment at the late-stage capitalist society in which he worries we are trapped. At the mercy of faceless financial markets and unaccountably over-complex systems, we seem enslaved by an income-creating algorithm, in which progressively less preside over increasingly more: the calculating cruelness of the global wealth pyramid. Seen across Scotland in the ever-growing divide between wealth and poverty, and the shameful recent 400% rent hikes on Glasgow’s Trongate 103 cultural hub, the increasing lack of empathy and philanthropy evident in those with power, leads the artist to imagine the ‘best’ of us evolving into cold, commodified, profit pursuing machines. Ultimately, the artist envisages the scenario, that when this world is spent and done, one sole robot will bow before the financial deity which has bestowed all the riches and power upon it. But at what cost?
With this loose science fiction narrative, the artist hopes to provoke thought and critique around what contemporary society values, questioning our deep-established late-capitalist way of life and the toll it takes on the environment, our culture, and our humanity.
