Elliott Flanagan
A Piece of Something Bigger (2018)
HD Video
Duration: 7 minutes
Accessibility:
Visuals: Warning, this film includes some flashing and flickering images which may trigger
photosensitive viewers. Audio: The film has no spoken dialogue.
Viewing:
Click the bottom right icon to view in fullscreen. Headphones or speakers required.
About the work:
A Piece of Something Bigger explores contemporary masculinity through the prism of package holiday culture. Flanagan looks at the ideas entrenched in the male gender stereotype that saturated his youth as a way of disentangling himself. Misunderstood and under pressure to conform and perform, he studies a tension from his own experience between one’s own consciousness and social expectation.
The traditional form of masculinity and its lack of complexity is subverted, as the viewer is party to glimpses of real honesty in the chaos. The video discusses the camaraderie that exists in relationships between men and the value of the communal experience therein.
Music by William Brown and Ashley Snook.
About the artist:
Elliott Flanagan is an artist, poet and writer exploring contemporary masculinity via psychogeographic dreams and disorienting post-industrial backdrops of exotica and lovesickness. Local landmarks transfigure into divine monuments, fast paced reality blends with fragments of memory and a personal high pop culture.
Presented as part of the University of Salford Art Collection’s Art Film Season 2024, March – June 2024.