Lynette Wallworth (never heard of her before but we've already established I’m a philistine) makes hypnotising images ‘fall’ from projectors placed in the ceiling which you or I ‘catch’ in ceramic bowls that are given at the entrance of the installation.
I’ve decided I like installations that completely submerge you in an extreme environmental space. I.e. Anthony Gormley’s Blind Light. It acts as a de-prickifier, jarring you out of your usual urban, jaded, wanker frame of mind to one of child like wonder as you're forced to enter a space that is completely alien to the one you’ve just come from.
Walking through the BFI building, apart from the striking architecture and lay out of the place you can’t help thinking, fuck-in-hell, this place is so far up its own arse my arse is actually hurting in sympathy. You know the sort of thing: big open plan spaces with a trendy café/bar with leather chairs and a carpet that’s meant to look like grass and a sort of video/web lab where everyone looks like an information pervert, hooked up to a personal giant screen, headphone’s donned like some kind of dystopian nightmare.
Then you enter the gallery space which is pitch-black. All the urban trendiness is forgotten as you’re enveloped by blackness. We had a mumbling porter who handed us our bowl and pointed the way with a flash light. In the installation proper there are four circular images being project from the ceiling on to the floor. Its then up to you which ones you go up to and what way you view the images projected on your bowl by turning it over for different perspectives.
The images themselves are mainly microscopic sea life and epic star-scapes. Throughout there’s, that usually annoying, new age muzak. Whale song, random bells etc but in this environment of sense deprivation, coupled with the images, it was genuinely enjoyable and hypnotising. I’d recommend a visit but as it ends today you’d better get on your bike or microbe.
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