City Changes consists of twenty text works, starting with a description of a city in which nothing ever changes. This initial text gets rewritten to produce a sequence of 19 increasingly preposterous variations of this imaginary place. Extending Etchells' interest in rules and formal structures the work alternates repeatedly between a picture of the city as a place of order and routine, and a description of it as a site of perpetual change and multiplicity. Each text contains a complex colour-coded trace of the changes the artist makes from one revision to the next, rendering visible the process of writing itself much has Etchells' work in performance has sought to expose the processes and conventions of spoken text and the stage. At the same time, City Changes playfully unpacks some of the political and emotional baggage carried by concepts such as change and chaos, stability and stasis.



exhibition until Saturday 13.12.