The Showroom | Oliver Rees: Confidence Tricks: Lessons in Insolvency Episodes 1 and 2

Oliver Rees presents 2 video episodes and 100 drawings from the series Confidence Tricks: Lessons in Insolvency.

Episode 1. His New Best Seller (Drawings 1-50, video, 20 mins) and Episode 2. The Death of Joseph Gandy (Drawings 51-100, video, 20 mins)

Confidence Tricks: Lessons in Insolvency is a series of 150 drawings, or 3 episodes, that can be seen as drawings, 20-minute video presentations and online here.

The work is a historical biography of sorts that is based around an uneasy relation with the narcissistic and irrational Comparative Architecture project of the unsuccessful 19th century British architect Joseph Gandy.

The episodes of Confidence Tricks take up the strange genre of Gandy’s defective watercolour pedagogy, along with his problems with debt, to present a drawn series that represents the banal process of defaulting on loans as experimental practice.

Oliver Rees is a London based artist. Recent solo shows and as part of the group Model Court include Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Stroom Den Haag, The Hague, Gasworks, London, 2014; Limoncello, London, 2013; Theaterhaus Jena, Jena, The Hole, London, 2012; Bonheur Theatre, Rotterdam; Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2011.

Episode 1. His New Best Seller: Credit Psychosis
(Drawings 1-50, video, 20 mins)
Is a lesson drawn from the process of defaulting on debt, which is about disorientation and strangers.

Episode 2. The Death of Joseph Gandy: A Story of Masculine Unhappiness
(Drawings 51-100, video, 20 mins)
Is a lesson about the un-refreshing nature of men’s traditions that is based upon two images of symbolic death that are obliquely woven into a drawn narrative of men coming to terms with themselves