The Dawn of the Deli
The realisation of a new ‘slow slapstick’ genre, The Dawn of the Deli is a meditation on the normative tide of history towards blanket gentrification, ponderously filtered through the sensibility of reclusive, fasting, salad-starved monks.
In a gallery, Simon Raven and Aaron Williamson enact an imaginary dark-age cell occupied by two cowled monks initiating the incantatory mystic Dawn of The Deli. Fogged in dry ice and muttering Gregorian/Death Metal inflexions, they attempt to answer the growing demand for monk-brewed condiments, authentic moon-dried tomatoes, goat’s brie and other, exclusive, lovingly hand-selected ingredients.
Sombre, hushed expectation accompanies their funereal attempts to respond to the assembled audience’s rarefied culinary requests, in between creating a dark-age world map by pinning up ‘gourmet’ salad leaves around the walls.
Aaron Williamson’s engagement with performance, objects, place, and space has been entirely transformed through the experience of becoming profoundly deaf over the course of some twenty years. Informed by this radical personal alteration, his art practice takes an interdisciplinary approach. Hence his artistic projects remain open to innovation according to circumstance and he has worked with performance, installation, photography, video, sculpture, text, choreography, and digital art – often combining elements within one work. In the last ten years he has created performances, publications, installations, and artist’s videos in Britain, Europe, Japan, Greenland, China, and North America. In 1997 he completed his doctoral thesis on performance, writing, and bodily identity at the University of Sussex. His publications include Hearing Things (Bookworks – 2001) and A Holythroat Symposium (1993). He was awarded the Helen Chadwick Fellowship in Rome in 2002, and is currently an AHRC Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at BIAD, UCE (2004 – 07). He is the Artistic Director of the collective of disability artists, 15mm Films.