Charlie Woolley: Lone Soul Road

Charlie Woolley’s exhibition considers cultural themes and aesthetics relating to motorcycle counterculture. This continues his investigations into subcultural production in an age of avatars and fluid digital identity.

In recent years subcultural imagery has undergone an intensive shift. Certain iconographies and signifiers once considered criminal or subterranean have become common-place and readily available. Similarly, identities that once upon a time may have taken a lifetime to earn, can now, in the form of the avatar, be taken on instantly then discarded and replaced indefinitely.

Woolley identifies this as the crux of his work, the point at which reliable codes give way to a preferred digital fluidity. Whilst capitalist monoculture invades every aspect of life, the digital still offers a rugged frontier of available modes of living. The digital arena provides a non-commodifiable response to the total consumption of underground culture.

Lone Soul Road is a film installation in which Woolley utilises the iconic and once ‘hard-earned’ badge of the outlaw biker to pose an overarching question about the authenticity of traditional countercultural space. Has counterculture really been entirely subsumed by commerce and was its existence ‘outside’ of capital merely a fantastical mirage?