Coventry-based artist Alan Van Wijgerden has been making videotapes for over 15 years. He has also made films, written and acted in plays, and worked as an electronics technician. Van Wijgerden is a rather acoustic artist and a human who knows that the parts don’t fit, although they are supposed to hypothetically. The titles in this exhibition are revealing. Video Head might refer to the seriously committed artist, or perhaps to the idiot box that literally frames the performer’s head. The All Electric Home is an inventory, with the objects not only surrounding but also dominating the occupant. And Sent to Coventry invokes Strangeways, or some other penitentiary.

Along with the rest of us, Van Wijgerden lives in a hopelessly-wired world. The artist acknowledges British kitchen-sink realist drama as a formative influence, but the ghosts of television and absurdist theatre insist on editing that realism. The artist and his collaborators appear to live and work in a bed-sit, and the external world is reduced to a piss-take on a hometown celebrity documentary. Van Wijgerden likes telling stories, but knows that linearity is crap. Real and surreal trip over each other in the artists’ confined spaces – the everyday becomes exotic because there’s no other choice.

Van Wijgerden knows that he is trapped in the box. He can twist the wires but they are permanently installed. Does physically deconstructing the video medium finally smash the patterns? Of course not, the task would be impossible for such an oral performer. The digital cannot entirely excise the analogue, and technology has always uneasily coexisted with performance and testimony Van Wijgerden’s mise en scne is beyond contradiction, but his life and art nevertheless proceed courageously.