Toby Lloyd
Toby Lloyd works in the tradition of conceptual photography established in the late 1960s and early 1970s by such figures as Keith Arnatt and John Stezaker. Lloyd has remarked that Arnatt’s series of self-portraits, titled as the ‘Impossible Document’, have provided a particular inspiration. In this series, the earlier artist documented his performances of improbable, absurd or self-referential tasks recorded sequentially by the camera. Whilst drawing on Arnatt’s example, Lloyd’s work has its feet firmly in the twenty-first century. Lloyd has described his project as “an investigation of the self and my environment through a series of self-portraits… I am interested in how we negotiate the landscape of advertising and corporate branding.” The unstinting celebration of the self, through consumer activity, might certainly be said to be one difference between Arnatt’s generation and those after. One of Lloyd’s most recent works, ‘Narcissus’, bears this out. It documents what might be described as an image of extraordinary ordinariness: a screenshot of the Google homepage. There can be few people who have not seen this image. It is, truly, one of the few pictures which almost every adult and child can claim to be familiar with, and yet has almost no visual interest. Lloyd’s use of the page as a ‘found image’ is intentionally banal to the highest degree. The simplicity of the work belies the fact that it is a palimpsest, a way to open out onto wider social and psychological tendencies. Lloyd’s means of achieving this is through the addition to the page of his own name: minimal means with maximum meaning being his dictum. The work is a taut description of our collective love of new technologies, but it is at another level, an old-fashioned cautionary tale dressed in the newest of clothes. For those of a certain age, the work echoes the Victorian trope taught to children that if one gazes into a mirror long enough, one would see the devil reflected back. Here, in the virtual space, like in the Victorian looking glass, we not only see ourselves, but our deepest fears embodied, and encounter the relentless horrors that are our true selves.
