Threat is looming on Charles Avery’s island. As glass eels writhe in filthy buckets and revellers dance in the market square, a group of rebels, terrorists, fighters is taking up arms in the desert and preparing for an assault. Danger, tension, violence is coming.
Avery has been creating his fictional island since 2004. It’s a container for ideas, narratives, contexts and aesthetics. He paints scenes of island life, designs posters that exist in the paintings and on the walls of the gallery. There’s an old woman in blue in a few of the paintings, a seer, according to the poem in the gallery window. She knows what’s coming. The tourists browsing market stalls have no idea.
The painting of the people in the desert shows them agitating, guns and spears in hand. Are they getting ready to take the city, or just clear it of tourists, or maybe just wipe out the vice and squalor and rampant capitalism.
That’s the thing about Avery’s island. The lore is dense and complex and the narratives are never clear, so you’re left to figure it out, to imagine what is coming, and what has come before. There’s a tension between insiders and outsiders, locals and tourists, acceptance and rejection. But beyond that, it’s all murk.
The show is a brilliant mixture of twisted narrative implications, graphic design and sculptural installation. You don’t know what’s about to happen, but you can be sure it will involve a whole lot of violence.