Daydreaming probably gets a lot of us through the day: thinking about what might have been, or what could be. I imagine British artist Ben Rivers as a daydreamer, someone who is in tune with his inner explorer. The four films included in his show all circumnavigate lands that don’t conform to the expected, where anything goes.
In ‘Ah Liberty’, a remote rural vista pans across the wall, where a family of kids wearing hand-made masks muck about amid piles of broken vehicles. Left to their own devices they resemble the characters of William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies’. The grainy sepia tone, the lack of restraint and the countryside marred by debris all add a sense of foreboding for this micro-community.
‘There is a Happy Land Further Awaay [sic]’ plunges you into the misty jungle island of Tanna in the South Pacific, where, again, children play and a bubbling volcano spurts molten lava. A young woman’s voice reads out excerpts of a story about someone in a far-off country. The gallery walls are covered in corrugated metal, the hues of rusty terracotta and dusty grey mimicking the huts in the film. Again an overwhelming uneasiness looms, and it turns out the island was devastated by Cyclone Pam.
Rivers encourages glimmers of nostalgia as his 16mm works flicker grittily in the galleries. His ode to the reclusive British painter Rose Wylie is beautifully mediated through two suspended projections that follow the shy-yet-charismatic artist as she paints, ponders life and feeds her cat.
Alongside his own work he has curated a small show, ‘Edgelands’, which includes works by surrealist Max Ernst, under-appreciated British modernist Prunella Clough and category-defying Keith Arnatt. Although it’s clear he wants us to see alternatives to the ordinary and to evoke in us a desire to living without confines, arguably, it’s here that he most eloquently proposes the beauty of the marginal.