Mr Monkey sees Spaceship Unbound at the Castlefield Gallery
Venue : Castlefield Gallery
Start date: 21 June 2013
End date : 27th July 2013
Visit date : 4th July, 2013
Scampering through Manchester Mr Monkey popped into the Castlefield Gallery to see their latest exhibition, Spaceship Unbound.
Spaceship Unbound is co-curated with MadLab (Manchester Digital Laboratory) and uses Margaret Atwood's novel The Year of the Flood as the base for an exploration of survival in a post-apocalyptic world.
There nine artists or groups and a wide variety of media represented in the exhibition, including apparently simple sketches and collages, multi-layered perspex constructions, a mask made of corn used in a ritual outside parliament and some fairly complicated installations.
Mr Monkey was fascinated by Austerity and Anarchy by Ellie Harrison, in which a cone of blue light is projected through a cloud of artificial fog produced by a fog machine. The size of the cone and the frequency of bursts of fog are related to government expenditure and apolitical riots in the years 1950 to 2011.
Mr Monkey also particularly enjoyed Sam Meech's film Noahs Ark, which is assembled from footage from the North West Film Archive, with a spoken narrative by Nathan Jones and a score by Carl Brown. To start the film you have to find someone who is prepared to pedal the somewhat ramshackle bicycle provided by Hackspace. Mr Monkey would have done the cycling, but he's only got short legs, so he volunteered Mr Rik. Mr Rik would like to point out that the earphone leads are too short for the cyclist's comfort.
Mr Monkey thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition, though he couldn't always see the exact connection to surviving in an post-apocalyptic world (maybe it would help if he'd read the book).
