Come Back

Artist and musician LA Timpa presents his first UK solo exhibition and new body of work extending his compositional practice into spatial form. Rooted in memory, the installation considers how sound leaves its trace on physical matter, proposing sculpture as a resonant architecture through which histories are held, carried, and given agency. The exhibition spans sculpture, built environment, audio, and moving image, engaging discarded materials and provisional method alongside the materiality of audiovisual media. Come Back incorporates an ambitious new sound installation featuring the lo-fi audio playback equipment that the artist has used to produce his work for over a decade. Timpa's commitment to obsolete technologies–the Dolby cassette recorder, the flip-top phone, and digital camera–function as both an emotional and political gesture for the artist. This choice constitutes a direct rejection of the smoothed-out immediacy of digital sound and instead embraces analogue qualities that deliberately soften and subdue audio, rounding its edges rather than sharpening its clarity, as if the sound was wrapped in dust or memory. The entry point to the exhibition is the moving-image work Circle (2019), a video capturing family life, made with the artist's digital camera and constructed into a patchy fiction about what Timpa describes as "A former American spy readjusting to life in society and reconnecting with his daughter". Animation Series (2022-2023), a new work compiled of various audio shorts taken from the original 6 episodes released on his website in 2023, is presented in the back space of the gallery (recontextualized). The shorts are sequenced and played in real time through a 1990s Dolby cassette player and speakers, tracked across two visual display devices: one a CRT monitor, the other digitally recorded via the backlit LCD display of a portable linear recorder. Emanating from a make-shift exterior basement space, built in the main part of the gallery, a subterranean soundscape unfolds through a layered collision of construction noise; drums; strings; dialogue; a child's recital; family dispute and a bone thrown around in an empty room, captured via a Sony Ericsson, mini-cassette and linear recorder to blend found audio with field recordings. These are crafted and composed using raw, organic playback, that employ methods of looping, repetition, silence, reverberation, pitch, cut-ups, and volume shift. Physical gesture is embedded within the composition through the clacking mechanics of the cassette recorder. Its indexical stop, start, rewind, pause, and playback are audible throughout, not digital glitch, but the sound of human intervention. These motorized articulations become integral to the soundscape itself. Timpa embraces the stubbornness of materiality and its resistance to seamless, computerised audio through sculptural handling and deliberate intervention, while remaining open to interruption and contingency. Quotidian noise, punctuated by moments of silence, tests the relational and social atmospheres within the exhibition, cultivating conditions that heighten the receptive possibilities for attentive listening. Through repair, adaptation, and processes of sequencing, erasure, and production, Timpa's work carries traces of improvisation, reflecting tensions between fragility and resilience. Recording, listening, and making operate as both emotional strategies and conceptual gestures, to navigate the porous terrain between internal worlds and the social and political structures that surround them. Drawing on personal narratives shaped by precarity, the work extends to broader reflections on exile and return.