A multimedia evening on All Souls Day to launch Sophie Sleigh-Johnson’s Code: Damp, out this November on Repeater Books, and available to purchase on the night.
Starting at 7 pm, and featuring a darts-themed television in-conversation with writer Jon K Shaw, the event will also feature sound, readings, and artwork by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, all operative as props extrapolated from the depths Code: Damp’s pages. The evening will be interspersed with DJing by artist Keira J Fox.
‘They say damp records the past – if that’s so, I’ve got the library yet.’ (The Fall, ‘NoBulbs’)
Code: Damp: An Esoteric Guide to British Sitcoms by Sophie Sleigh-Johnson is an imaginative counter-(oc)cultural history charting unexpectedly esoteric patterns underlying two of Britain’s most popular sitcoms, Rising Damp and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin – both insufflated by the demonic powers of actor Leonard Rossiter. This darkly comic book charts a unique hauntology of transhistorical
devices that have been, and always will be, repeating themselves. Like a TV guide meeting an archaeological manual, it tunes into and sifts the multiple strata of existence, and suggests that in our cyber-mediated and geo-localisable acceleration, time might still be a damp condensation, seeping through the centuries, and out onto the telly. A metaphor and symbolism that is manifest in everything from alchemy, mysticism, and eerie English landscapes, to folk horror, pop music, the local newspaper and beer cans.
“A quite unparalleled work by a quite remarkable person. The fabric under the surface; the fragments under the whole.” IRVING FINKEL | Author of First Ghosts
“A most welcome ludibrium, Code: Damp is a tour de force of close-riveted situationist, alchemical and surrealist dives into an imagined unconscious in search of lost insight.” TOBIAS CHURTON | Author of Aleister Crowley
“Situ-dada myth-history delirium at its very very best!” ESTHER LESLIE | Author of Hollywood Flatlands
https://repeaterbooks.com/product/code-damp-an-esoteric-guide-to-british-sitcoms/
Biographies:
Sophie Sleigh-Johnson, born 1988, is a Southend-on-Sea-based artist and writer. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College, London, where she now teaches as an Associate Lecturer in Fine Art Critical Studies. Her performance work, comprising sound collage and spoken word with printmaking and props, occasions exhibitions, tape cassette releases and performances both nationally and internationally. She writes as a local journalist for The Leigh Times, and for publications including the Darkside, and the London Drinker.
www.sophiesleigh-johnson.co.uk
@sleigh.johnson
Jon K Shaw is a writer, editor and educator based in Orkney. It has taught on various Art, Art History and Art Theory courses, including fifteen years with the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London;and at West Dean College. He is currently Curriculum Leader in Art and Design at the Orkney branch of University of Highlands and Islands, where he also teaches on the MA Contemporary Art and Archaeology. With Tom Robinson it founded and edited Rattle: A Journal at the Convergence of Art and Writing, and with Theo Reeves-Evison edited and introduced the book Fiction as Method (Sternberg, 2017). Its ongoing research concerns immanence, substrate and the philosophies, cultures, biologies and geontologies of movement. It is currently working on two books: one on the ‘lucid materialism’ of Antonin Artaud,and a second on performance, poetry, dance and financial products that suspend oppositions between life and death.
Jon’s artistic practice concerns the development and mobilisation of concepts andbodies in the context of planetary materiality, which most often manifests as sound, publication, photography, conversation and farming.