An attempt to avoid the dissatisfaction that everything relevant will not be recorded (London – Bergen)

Volt is presenting a new project by Phil Coy at Gallery USF. A standard issue wooden crate, empty aside from an audio recording device and large battery is collected from the artist's studio in London and shipped via land and sea to Gallery USF in Bergen, Norway. On arrival the crate is opened out and the sound that it recorded on route is played back into the gallery space. Subsequent shows see the work made to perform its function once again, always recording and then playing back its journey as it moves from one gallery or exhibition to the next.

Made in part with reference to Robert Morris Box with the sound of it's own making (1961) the work is intended to extend the internalised elegance of Morris's original gesture and its implied assault on the autonomous art object, to that of a contemporary expanded field of globalised trade (exemplified by the art market). As if to extenuate its relationship to global art trade still further this essentially empty crate makes its first journey away from London simultaneously with the beginning of the Frieze art fair whereby a large proportion of the worlds contemporary art will arrive in London in identical crates. As an object and sound piece, the three and a half day field recording offers more obtuse and suggestive readings, articulated in part by the chance factors involved as to when the viewer sees and hears the work, and at which point in the journey they intercede.

Phil Coy’s work employs a range of mediums from film, sound, photography, drawing, printing and sculpture to text-based and generative performance. His practice has continued to force seemingly irreconcilable materials into dialogue, often replaying ideas rooted in the radical art practices of the 1960s into the language, architecture and systems that drive today’s culture of global commerce.

Phil Coy was born in Gloucester and studied at Liverpool John Moores, Ecole des Beaux Arts de Nantes and The Slade School of fine art. He lives and works in London.

He has exhibited recently at Cornerhouse, ICA and South London Gallery. His film Wordland (2008) was premiered by LUX with a live soundtrack by Alexander Tucker. Whitstable Biennale, Futurecity and FLAMIN commissioned Façade (2010) that will be screened at the South London Gallery on 8-9 October 2010.

Coy also produces a series of publications and performance lectures that are edited from found and recorded language. The most recent; Adaptive reuse and exfiltration was performed alongside referential screenings at The Whitechapel Gallery on 30 September. He is currently preparing for a two-person show Phil Coy & Yuko Shiraishi that opens at The Russian Club Gallery on 24 November 2010. An attempt to avoid the dissatisfaction that everything relevant will not be recorded (London – Bergen) will be Phil Coy's first solo show in Norway.