Matthew Denniss: Future Imperfect

The built environment and the optimistic attempts by 20th century architects to press 'fast forward' to the future provide the starting points for two video pieces by Matthew Denniss, showing as part of a joint show with Matthew Houlding at Manchester's Bureau gallery. The exhibition sees the two artists apparently emerge from opposing camps. Houlding expresses sympathy with futurist designers' utopian ideals by developing a series of fantastic, imagined architectural models. Denniss takes a more critical view.

The Utopian Buck Stops Here, Denniss's 2012 video that also provides the exhibition's title, uses archive footage of Brasilia – the modernist capital of Brazil – that the artist found on the internet. Obtained quickly in unspoiled, spectacular rainforest in the 1950s, the clips offer an effective study in how humans can dramatically alter their surroundings to suit economic or political ambitions. “I wanted to go to Brasilia,” Denniss says. “But it turned out that I didn't need to go all that way. By using footage from the web I could actually make the film more directly and more quickly.”

An accidental breakthrough in his practice, the cutting and pasting of found video is something Denniss sees as a blessing of the modern age, but no more groundbreaking than collage techniques. “Artists have been working with found images for a long time,” he says. “From British pop artists looking at American culture by clipping things out of newspapers, it's a well-trodden path. I'm trying to use YouTube in the same way.”

Soundtracked by Denniss reciting bleak visions of the future from HG Wells' The Time Machine, the narrative undermines the architectural achievements of Brasilia's gleaming white buildings and intricately planned boulevards. Denniss explains that the words fitted the moving image as a result of coincidence rather than planning – yet they successfully evoke the author Robert Hughes's assertion that 'nothing dates faster than people's fantasies about the future', a sentiment that chimes with Denniss's own misgivings regarding Brasilia's development and the exploitation of Brazil's natural resources.

A second video, this year's Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative draws more strongly on Denniss's sculptural practice (he is one of 10 nominees for this year's Broomhill National Sculpture Prize), with the artist dressing as radical thinker, author and architect Buckminster Fuller to build and then burn a model of Fuller's most enduring legacy – the geodesic dome, a lightweight spherical structure constructed from triangular segments to provide strength. “He had a ruthless logic,” Denniss says of Fuller. “He worked out the shape of the dome, but it was later found to already exist in carbon atoms. Nature is ruthlessly logical, finding the best solutions to the problems it faces. Fuller had also found the strongest, most logical solution.”

At 21 minutes, the video tribute is a thorough document, condensing the painstaking 18-hour, by hand construction of the large wooden dome. But it's what the film doesn't reveal to the viewer that resonates most for Denniss. “Halfway through the filming a group of people who had been taking part in a residency came over and started to take part,” he recalls. “They got really involved in the discussion of how to burn it down. It took on a life of its own. Then, while it was burning we had tea around it. That element of chance is something I'd like to develop further.”

As a developing artist, the Goldsmiths graduate admits he's still experimenting as he flirts with drawing, sculpture, performance and film. But as an award nominee with an exhibition in his home city, his reflection on his progression – “This year has been a good year” – feels something of an understatement.