- Venue
- Phoenix Brighton
- Starts
- Saturday, February 11, 2012
- Ends
- Sunday, March 25, 2012
- Address
- 10?14 Waterloo Place Brighton BN2 9NB East Sussex UK
- Location
- South East England
We present an installation of large-scale prints by Canadian artist Derek Besant. The work is themed around core redevelopment and upheaval within several large cities, and the temporary state of chaos that results in the streets. Based on reconstructed photographic images of building sites in Budapest, Vienna, London, Toronto, Mexico City, Calgary and Shanghai, the images of these cities’ infrastructures reveal them to be complex narratives embedded in space and time. Cities are continually excavating the past and dismantling the present.Besant looks upon these events as theatrical interventions or temporary acts in which people reorganize materials and space into and out of chaos. The images in the exhibition, created using industrial printing processes onto veil-like scrims, expose aspects of the city which, by their very ubiquity, usually go unnoticed. Occasionally these sites capture our attention, and we get a fleeting glimpse of the city’s underbelly. Alongside this is a screening of Jayne Wilson’s two short films from a series about the power of the past. All That Mighty Heart offers an observation on our contemporary malady of supposed urgency, using the imagery of clocks and timekeeping. Hey Presto! reflects upon engineering, technology, time and magic, agents of change in the modern world.
