Pretty, Vacant 7

 

All Images: Central Leicester, December 2020

This piece takes the form of a meticulously-assembled diorama - describing a section of unspecified, post-catastrophic urban territory.  The piece is largely constructed from modular, architectonic elements, which form the stable, orderly grid on which the city is established.  Individual components have been organised within envelopes of standardised dimensions and format, to create an arrangement of blocks, segmented by the network of communicating channels and pathways running between them.  

At the lower levels, we see that this basic structure appears relatively stable.  However, as our eyes travel upward, we observe how forces of entropy, disruption, and 'problematic events', increasingly serve to randomise a once-orderly scene.  Our gaze travels across the details of a chaotic terrain of scattered fragments and churned debris.  The networks are broken; the grids - destabilised.  We witness the breakdown of boundaries, the bursting of perceived containers of civilisation, and the resultant dispersal of the previously ordered contents within.  Amongst the already familiar components, we discern how elements one might regard as unrelated (or at least peripheral) to he city's overall formation, are pitched into the mix.  The new interactions thus created are both unfamiliar and disturbing, and we can only guess at the new situations of disquiet playing out in their shadows and concealed recesses.

Cleverly, this scene has been designed to be viewed from multiple viewpoints.  The play of our own perceived reality across the immediate glazed surface leads to inevitable reflection on the relationship between what lays both within and without.  However, we should also ensure we take in the view beyond too.  Seen in this manner, and from certain angles, a potentially perplexing scalar continuity between interior and exterior features emerges.  The separation between depicted events, and our own 'situation' (macro vs micro-crisis) becomes harder to discern.  Ultimately, we are invited to consider whether this exhibit presages events to come, or constitutes an instructive diagram of the mechanisms of disaster, and a model for their effective negotiation.  A third possibility, of course, is that the piece simply represents another, stylish episode of post-apocalyptic [1.] spectacle, of the sort to which we have all become addicted in recent years.

[1.]:  An oft-misused terminological impossibility - as should surely be recognised at this stage.  The degree to which our culture now recycles escapist visions of its own collapse, is clearly of direct relevance here, and a matter worthy of discussion elsewhere - no doubt.