The core of Aled Simons practice explores pseudo-scientific ritual, anecdote, humour and memory. He often employs looping or repetition—the ubiquitous gif, meme or zine formats. Early 1990s television and its specific place at the junction of a shift between analogue broadcast and digital on-demand viewing. Joke shop props feature heavily and he operates in the space between the tension release of a laugh and the awkwardness of things that go on too long or fall flat and fail. 

 

He confesses that he sometimes scares himself by imagining all the stuff that is important to him on the internet is wiped out by a digital apocalypse. The work is an attempt to preserve a skewed legacy of humankind; a mass of debris collected at the shoreline after a catastrophic wave has wiped out most of what we once knew or half-remember. Re-interpreting or misunderstanding the idea of an heirloom—a virtual keepsake.

 

Past, present and future all at once. Performative whims born of pseudoscience, sham witchcraft and misinterpreted ritual, an impulse that becomes compulsion—all filtered through a childhood dressing-up box. This is Aled Simons’ practice. Lost and forgotten photographs recreated from memory. Charged totems. Hundreds and Thousands, joke shop vomit and a homemade Hulk Hogan costume from 1991. Imagine a drumroll that goes on forever, the joke gets old fast, it’s like a fanfare for an event that may never happen, or that is happening over and over and over again. A dream in which you strip naked in the living room of your grandparent’s council house. You are nude, jumping from armchair to settee, then from settee back to armchair singing Lady in Red by Chris De Burgh or Cliff Richard’s Living Doll—the one with The Young Ones. This is also Aled Simons’ practice.