The future’s not bright. Hell, for the most part it isn’t even a little shiny. At least not in the world that Steve Bishop and Richard Sides have dreamed up. The two young artists have curated a group show that, despite the optimism of the title, paints a dusty, dishevelled picture of our impending future. There are no glistening technological marvels here, just crumbling, ramshackle, mutated versions of now.
You enter past a bunch of cheaply knocked off and messily assembled posters, inviting you to explore some distant moon. A sculpture of a severed hand (pictured), by Stuart Middleton, hangs on the wall, tangled in wires and dripping fluid into a sack. There are bottles of that filthy fluid scattered across the gallery, while hastily patched-together sculptures of PVC tubing and sportswear by Renaud Jerez lie prostrated across the space, like knackered, long-broken robots. A slide projector scrolls through a series of comic book-like panels about alcoholism and tapeworms (by Middleton), while Sasha Litvintseva’s quiet film about a sci-fi family holiday in Turkey plays in the background.
A series of paintings on the wall tie it all together. Louisa Gagliardi’s airbrushed cubo-futurist landscapes and Richard Parry’s globby white canvases with stark silhouetted black figures are particularly strong.
None of the individual works here is breathtaking, but there’s an atmosphere that makes the show more than the sum of its parts. It all feels like some nasty prospective junk shop. The suggestion is that our future will be just as littered with crap as our present. If this is the future of art, though, we’ve got something well worth looking forward to.
Eddy Frankel