Allenheads Contemporary Arts
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The Future 2, 3 & 4
David Lisser - Liam Murray - Alan Smith
I make no hypothesis.The future always surprises. Our predictions epitomise our own era. Borne from
a desire to understand and illustrate the aspirations, anxieties or inadequacies of the time we live in, predictions can reveal more about the predictor than the predicted.
Metaphor offers meaning to experience and context to knowledge; it is a fundamental facility through which people make sense of their surroundings.
A telescope’s configuration of lenses goes some way to describing the intangible scale of Space, like chapters in a Bible attempt to describe the Heavens. Through the viewfinder we see in sharper contrast planets and galaxies swimming in the obscure darkness of Space. We can search there for hope, solace, peace and redemption. The limited field of the viewfinder may be seen as metaphor for the inadequacy of contemporary tenet.
All we view in the night sky is darkness and dots of light. We acknowledge norms of scientific and historical truth but question the limits of our own perceptions. The possibility of miracles seduce despite improbability. In this darkness, although we are actually viewing the distant past, a mythology of future in Space intrigues beyond all else.
Its the future, in Allenheads a small, remote high fell village in the north of England long after oil and gas supplies have been depleted; larger towns and cities have been abandoned, many people have moved further south to escape the harsh winters.
Allenheads once again becomes remote in the truest sense of the word – there is little or no contact with the outside world.
Larger animals have been hunted to near extinction, and farmed produce comes at a punitive cost, the options are limited.
Following in the centuries-old footsteps of many Nomadic tribes, the ‘Midgecatchers’ travel in search of a highly nutritious prize; culicoides imputanctus - the biting midge.
Liam Murray
David Lisser
Alan Smith
What does the future mean to us and how far ahead do we have to look to liberate our imaginations and conjure the fantastic?
In 1968 a ground breaking film and book was released that was set in the future by a mere 33 years; 2001 A Space Odyssey. Its dramatic depiction of human evolution, technological advances, artificial intelligence and extra-terrestrial life placed that-then distant time excitingly out of reach, but we are now 11 years beyond that time.
I’ve taken the proximity of 33 years from now to provide the title for this video and in doing so provide an attainable time to imagine possible future scenarios.
For the content of the video I have drawn on the 1972 film Silent Running, in which a future is depicted when all plant life on Earth has been made extinct. Only a few species have been preserved in enormous, greenhouse-like domes attached to a fleet of space ships, with the intent of eventual return to earth for the reforestation of the planet.
‘2045’ is set close to home in the village of Allenheads with its precious plant life nurtured in domestic Poly Tunnels.
‘Hypotheses Non Fingo’
‘2045’
The exhibition is now on please call us for opening times
For more information contact: alanshead@acart.org.uk
tel: 01434 685040
Please call for opening hours
ACAshop (Old Post Office)
Allenheads, Northumberland NE47 9HR
Invite image Whistlers great, great, great, granddaughter Alan Smith 2011
‘The Midgecatcher's House'
The Future 2, 3, and 4
A review by Iris Priest
From the industrial revolution to dereliction and the subsequent rebuilding of the community, the remote village of Allenheads (high in the Northumbrian Pennines) has frequently been at the vanguard of social, technological and industrial developments and declines. Peppered with disused mine shafts, abandoned railways and the now idyllic, overgrown slag heaps, it is a potent location for examining the future through the lens of history. It is here that the 3 artists in Residence David Lisser, Alan Smith and Liam Murray, pose the question What will our future look like? And then What role will humanity play – individually and collectively – in creatively reimagining and building that future?
Sheltering from the icy, snow lined landscape outside, I squeeze into a dark corner behind a rickety coffee table, shrouded in a tartan table cloth. All of a sudden the deep, heavy sound of breathing erupts from the rafters, filling the innocuous, pleasant little village café with suspense. High on the café’s wall, beyond the wooden rafters, a projection of stars pierces the dark. As the coffee machine hums and teaspoons clink on teacups a distant orchestra gradually rumbles into the awareness of the café’s occupants, intensifying until it becomes a triumphant, dramatic fanfare. Just as two unsuspecting cyclists, replete with neon lycra suits and streamlined cycle helmets, enter the tiny café the date “2045” roars into sight. This is the beginning of Alan Smith's film 2045 a dystopian vision of the future based on close observation of the familiar and everyday and narrated by a sound track culled from an array of science fiction films. The film oscillates between long, contemplative shots of inane objects, suspended or empty domestic scenes, and shaky B-movie-esque commotion. Objects such as a zip, a showerhead, or two misshapen tomatoes acquire a mythological dimension as totems (or relics) of mankind’s innovation and as motifs for the proliferation of nature and natural farming amidst the collapse of humanity. The film climaxes with a deliberate nod to Silent Running (1972) as its frequented motif, the domestic poly-tunnel, floats off into space, carrying within it the edible plants Smith has nurtured there.
Presented by the unimaginable vastness of the universe Liam Murray cites Sir Isaac Newton’s seemingly self-consuming dictum 'Hypotheses Non Fingo' 'I Feign No Hypotheses'. In a drawing which appears to fix a glimpse of the infinitely shifting, incomprehensible universe, that statement seems at first reading both laced with irony and incomprehensibly circuitous. But this immediate interpretation is gradually dissolved by the unfolding spectacle of Murray's meticulous drawing. As the viewer’s eyes readjust to the fine marks and subtle shades of the drawing's surface (just as they do when staring up at the night sky) the reading of forms begins to shift; what was once a dark patch of starless galaxy becomes a planet, then a spaceship, then the pupil of an eye from behind which we are gazing out at this ethereal glimpse of the infinite. The circular format of Hypotheses Non Fingo is highly reminiscent of the lenses through which science grasps at the imperceptible regions of the universe; from the infinitesimally small to the incomprehensibly large. Murray’s relation of the universe, however, is one perpetually mediated by the drawn mark; it reminds the viewer that what we see is not the real reality but one, just as the universe depicted by astronomy and astrophotography, transcribed and ciphered through a human (and therefore limited, fallible) system of signs.
The Future 2, 3, 4 presents the work of three individuals attempting to envision and explore their own concepts of what the future may look like. What is lasting about this show, however, is the way in which it challenges the viewer to go beyond the limitations of the human ability to imagine; to uncover universal significance within the local and particular, to challenge current trends and ways of thinking, and to recognise that the future is happening now, and that we’re all a part of it.
Iris PriestÓ
Simon Hollington & Kypros Kyprianou