- Venue
- Backlit Gallery, Nottingham www.backlit.org.uk
- Location
- East Midlands
The exhibition constitutes a kind of living archive to the industrial heritage of the Backlit Gallery, an artist run organisation presently occupying a former textiles factory in Nottingham. The central focus is a kind of homily to the social activism of the original owner’s son, Samuel Morely. The resulting works explore his desire for collective advancement through the arts with varying levels of explicitness and implicitness; and sometimes tinged with filmic overtones.
The most overt work in the show channels Morely’s long departed soul through a medium, in Tracey McMaster’s video séance Caught between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. The red-sequinned suited medium recants Moreley’s memories of the building, be they imagined or otherwise, the conviction of his speech implies a truth. The work’s theatricality seemingly references the influence of surreal films and TV of the margins, in particular Twin Peaks. With a Morely recollection of a “burning lady running out of the building” indicative of the famously distorted rejoices of ‘fire, walk with me’.
The influence of film pervades Darren Banks’ Morley Engine, a multifaceted installation dominated by the metronomic sound of a filmed man endlessly skipping, in what might almost be a scene from American Psycho. Maybe he is continuously skipping or maybe the film is a cut loop; either way, the sound is so rhythmic and driving it mercilessly bores into the brain. Possibly, a reference to the absent repetitive beat of the looms now missing from the converted textiles factory.
The show’s next work is an actual film in which Yinka Shinobare uses his archetypal African textiles to send up colonial mores. This time in Un Ballo in Maschera, the premise of a masked ball is as one might imagine, taking place at a grandiose Scandinavian noble palace. All wigs and decorum; bar that is for the attendees’ vibrant clothes. As the film progresses, the rituals of social nuance emerge as the collective dances unfurl. Amusingly, the stretched and exaggerated sound effects of the dancers’ collective movements add to the sense of the absurd and imply the glorious Monkey Magic of times past and other martial arts films.
In the remaining works, matters get more physical, first with Mark Davey’s, Hung. A kinetic sculpture in which a long pink florescent bulb continually spins around to send a pair of yellowy underpants whirling on a cascading game of perpetual motion: cyclically rising until gravity demands the fall. The thematic game is that the pants are vintage International Morely. But to me this matters less, for it stands alone as an amusing and sensual piece.
Julian Wild’s Pelham System bridges his collaborative socially produced sculpture Making the Connection and the more autonomous sculptures where geometry tends toward the compact and precisely defined. The former would likely be the reason for his inclusion in the show, and its multiple creators invariably coalesce their actions into a linear chaos that creates the sense of a form, without explicitly defining it. This geometric freedom also pervades Wild’s Pelham System, which has become more architectonic and extends through the industrial carcass of the gallery like the ghost of prior mechanical venting. The meandering sculpture is composed of steel tubing, whose passage through the space is interrupted by deliberately oversized joints that underline the part by part construction.
Overall, the sense is of an intriguing exhibition that is almost too good to be tucked away in this venue, but of course, it is the old textiles factory that provides its source so it couldn’t, or shouldn’t, be elsewhere. In other words, seek out its location and visit before the show closes.
