Dereck Harris makes paintings that combine the idea of a pagan drama with an existential ‘theatre of the absurd’. He uses captured YouTube images of choreographer Maurice Bejart’s dance performance of Stravinsky’s ‘Rite of Spring’ (1970) which bear out both the demands of rehearsed performance and the beguiling nature of ritual. Air-brush paintings depict solidly modeled figures that hover in apparent suspension, whilst evoking an aura of 1970’s cinematic pool of light, or a bleached-out analogue video. It is a means of documenting timelessness: the depiction of the moment when time and technology slip.
