Lone Twin, Nine Years

Review in Issue 19-2 | Summer 2007

Lone Twin's Nine Years is a funny kind of retrospective. There's this hilarious diatribe that runs right through it about falling insects and fucking cappuccinos (or something that's laugh-out-loud funny). But it's also other kinds of funny. Though it's a retrospective, it's not a description of what Lone Twin's Gregg Whelan and Gary Winters have been up to for the last nine years. What remains after the judicious editing is a gloriously gentle tale of their work away from home and no sense that the pair spent a single moment apart (except once back in 2005 when Gary went to the loo just as the Beatles came on the radio). The world they describe is a giant heart-shaped city where they collect stories, start marathon line-dances and make clouds. It's peopled by lonely waiters, first time hang-gliders and the company's scattered, whispering supporters, who throw water when it's needed and use the pair like a vast trans-city dating service. In making the roads that they've travelled a single, unending road that spans from Canada to Australia, Lone Twin have located their tale with the precision of cartographers in the hyper-reality of experience. It is the geography of memory that they are mapping and they do so with a compelling simplicity of performance. The last kind of funny here is the quality of whimsical rage; they are at once apoplectic and fatalistic, innocent and wise. They spew rational nonsense that is written in sweet-hearted prose. At the end of it all, the journey brought them back home. What will they do now, if it's not conduct a worldwide search for someone to hold hands with on a bridge? Whatever it is, we can look forward to it with glee; it's taken them nine years to begin.

Presenting Artists
Presenting Venue
Date Seen
  1. Feb 2007

This article in the magazine

Issue 19-2
p. 29