For his exhibition Living Matter - Inflection Sandwich recent Wysing artists-in-residence David Osbaldeston will show video animations inside pieces of furniture and a set of composite prints made using digital and woodcut techniques.

Retro brown-wood cabinets and tables are assembled in the gallery, each remembering, or nearly forgetting a modern classic. They sit on factory-fabricated, white laminate pedestals. Osbaldeston’s animations are projected inside drawers and against the underside of cupboards. Each flashes, flickers, illuminating the hidden surfaces of the furniture.

Osbaldeston’s films are laboriously constructed stop-start animations. Each frame is made as a woodcut print. The negative for each print was scored into an old tabletop. The resulting moving image features the grain of the printing surface, now reminiscent of film grain, projected on to the wood grain of the furniture. This way of making, approaching tautology, might be described as a feedback loop. Through this approach Osbaldeston allows his motifs to act out a discussion between themselves; meaning appears to be a necessary but somehow irrelevant by-product.

Alongside the film projections hang a set of composite prints made using digital inkjet and woodcut methods. In these prints a digital, monochrome photograph depicts intricately fashioned and assembled forms, which resemble the laid-out workings of a mechanical watch. For the artist these exploded diagrams allude to analogue time machines.

The indefinite parts of each machine hang in a loose constellation. Over these photos Osbaldeston has made woodcut prints of texts with exclamations like ‘FAST FORWARD YOU DIGITAL FAT-HEAD’. Against the underlying images these phrases are partly obscured. The prints are hung in pairs so that their frames hold between them a shop bought egg sandwich, hovering at eye level, filling facing out.

Osbaldeston looks to recycle, reconfigure, and re-direct his work, to address it anew as information and to oppose its internment as Art. The egg sandwich is inserted here to reiterate, to pick up on themes: the sandwiching of ideas or images. Osbaldeston sees in it processes that are already underway in the work. It is mass-produced, ubiquitous, an overlooked symbol of near invisibility within modern life.

David Osbaldeston was in residency at Wysing Arts Centre as part of Convention T.

He is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London, where he held a solo exhibition in 2006. He has a forthcoming exhibition at Matt’s titled Private Views – Thinking Aloud.

Gallery opening hours are 12noon to 6pm, Friday to Sunday.