Andrew Roberts incorporates elements of roleplay, gameplay, and worldbuilding into his multiplatform practice, recognizing in these mechanisms a cultural structure where consumption and production become one. By exploring the material dimension of horror, Roberts’s digital animations, installations, sculptures, and poetry treat colonial agents as possessed images and haunted spaces. For this exhibition, Roberts’ body of work includes puppets brought to life through songs composed by the artist himself, who constructs a series of narrative worlds in which the logic of entertainment—particularly horror films and video games—becomes a critical device.

There are bodies that should not be opened. Andrew Roberts’s have the uncertain consistency of artificial things: creatures, mechanisms, the remains of a toy that has outlived its own world. When opened, they reveal miniature scenes in motion. Their bodies must be unfolded to gain access; then, one is left watching what happens inside.
Some characters meet, keep each other company, do insignificant things. Their gestures are clumsy, sometimes ridiculous. They draw close, stay together, and pass the time. There is something of shared life in them: small rituals, affections that are difficult to name, the unexpected importance of certain moments. Sometimes we recognize something before knowing exactly what it is.
The logic of transforming toys, capable of concealing miniature worlds within themselves, meets the enveloping atmospheres of shoegaze and digital animations that still retain the human gesture. The creatures and situations that emerge from these worlds oscillate between the grotesque, the absurd, and the affective.
There is something unsettling about having to open a body to look at what happens inside. The characters do not seem to notice our presence. They carry on with their small affairs, oblivious to whoever is watching. All that machinery, those outsized bodies, just to meet, keep each other company, spend some time together.
When closed, the bodies conceal their interiors once again. What remains is the feeling of having entered something we were not meant to see.