The Dark Ones… Philip Ob Rey’s V

We no longer record our history in our minds, or on stone tablets and walls that will carry our marks for centuries to come. As each decade has passed, we have found more fleeting capsules to contain our words and wisdom, scrolls that decay and books that burn, film that warps and data that disappears. Philip Ob Rey from Iceland is an artist who aims to capture the wisdom of the ancients in his work, using the trappings of modern communication to rebuild a race of giants who ceased to exist before we had left infancy as a species. Using VHS tape, Rey sculpts massive creatures, whose bodies are built of our memories flapping in cold winds. V, as the series is titled, is a collection of five scenes and sculptures, each a nightmarelike vision of black, shiny sinews, silent and stoic in a snowy, desolate Icelandic landscape. The resulting images are some of the most breathtaking I have ever seen. The Dark Ones walk the earth again…