Tommy Angel
Jonathan Allen

In a series of large black and white photographs, gospel magician Tommy Angel is seen deploying a heady mix of zealous Christian evangelism and glitzy magic showmanship. His message is ambiguous, his gestures mesmeric. A white-tipped magician's wand in the shape of a crucifix offers questionable salvation. The word FAITH appears on the flag of a child's bang-gun. A bible bursts into flames when opened. The images draw upon the choreography of fundamentalism common to north American evangelists and politicians worldwide, yet here magic offers a plural, more complex counterpoint.  

Tommy Angel is a fictitious photographic persona developed and performed to camera as part of an ongoing exploration of this suggestive cul-de-sac of western magic and religious history. According to Duane Laflin in Greater Gospel Magic, the first recorded gospel magician was Rev.C.H.Woolston, a Pennsylvanian pastor who used performance magic to illustrate biblical themes to American congregations in the early 1900's. Gospel magicians travelled with itinerant medicine shows, later appearing on vaudeville stages, and still perform today to devout congregations worldwide.

Set against a global backdrop of both renewed religious fundamentalism and widespread political duplicity, the contradiction inherent in gospel magic's presentation of 'truth' narratives through a medium dependant on misdirection becomes resonant. With performance magic itself entering something of a post-modern phase, Tommy Angel looks back and reminds us of magic's indivisibility with religion and the relationships of power upon which both rely. Tommy's props menace as pastoral lessons darken into mortality tales. Worship and mind-control collide in the numbers on a hymn board. Evoking the revivalist disfunction of Night of the Hunter and Elmer Gantry, Tommy Angel's magic routines become arguments with God, his world a double-edged meditation on belief, highlighting the ambivalent power of illusion and its role in assembling our sense of the real.

In each image, Tommy Angel appears close to life-size, suggesting a performer/audience relationship with the viewer, yet one caught in a disconcerting stasis. New props and acts for Tommy to perform are currently in development, including the famous head-on-the-table illusion re-worked as a decapitated John-the-Baptist; a dove routine evoking early renaissance representations of the holy-spirit; a Jesus ventriloquist act; a descent-from-the-cross escape illusion.