Surface Matters
Group exhibition
XL Gallery
Newcastle, UK
March 28– April 18, 2022

Lucas Glenn’s practice is one of repurpose— fashioning found material to speculate utopian and dystopian spaces for posthuman kinship and trouble. Alien, like many of his works, is a space of ecological strangeness.

Alien consists of late-night footage taken from a CCTV camera at the fourth tee of a golf course near Glenn’s studio. The footage is paired with stretched and distorted music from science-fiction soundtracks.

Its title references Ridley Scott’s Alien, a 1979 film known for describing horror with restraint. In Scott’s film, the camera-shy alien only receives 4 minutes of total screen time. Glenn’s video takes a similar approach, describing the uncanny and monstrous through grainy, dark pixelation rather than detail. A solitary labourer tends to the course. Vehicle headlights come in and out of view, exposing the terrain’s shape as they pass. A distant island’s radio towers methodically flash in an unclear sequence. Light imposes an extraterrestrial texture on this otherwise familiar space.

The film’s uncanny qualities echoe the strangeness of the place itself. The Royal Victoria Golf Club, the oldest golf course in Canada, stretches its facsimiles of Scottish hills across kilometres of stolen territory. An alien imposition on the coastline’s rocky, saline meadows.

– Statement from exhibiton

Slow Decay
Group exhibition
Audain Gallery, University of Victoria
February 14–18, 2024

Glenn’s time pulses at a different rate. By observing human activity on a golf course for an entire day, time reveals the inner workings of leisure, making its mark on our environment even more apparent.

– Excerpt from exhibition essay, Megan Dickie