Archaeologists analyse the imprint of humanity on the world. They do this through study of the objects we make, the ways we use those objects to shape our environment, and most spectacularly by uncovering the impressions of our bodies that have been deliberately or unconsciously left behind. Primitive tools give information, but it is the handprint on the side of a cave or the footprint fossilised into the geological strata that enables the imaginative leap to ask who was this specific person and what was her experience?

Mike Perry’s exhibition Land/Sea seeks to extrapolate information about the present in much the same way that archaeologists do for ancient worlds. What can material culture, objects, and the landscapes shaped by them, tell us about this specific moment? The exhibition brings together two bodies of work, Môr Plastig and Wet Deserts, which are formally distinct but both explore the relationship between humans, the environment, and time. Running throughout Perry’s practice is a deep concern with environmental issues and how to make sense of the conflicting impulses of horror and fascination, beauty and desolation, fear and the sublime.

Wet Deserts is a group of photographs shot on 10×8 film of Britain’s upland moors and mountains. These are the quintessential vistas of 18th century landscape painting and Romantic poetry, the kind of places that shaped Edmund Burke’s thinking in his 1757 essay ‘Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’. The opposition between beauty and the sublime has now been lost – sublimated, even – through the effect of Romanticism and the sublime is now seen as being super-beauty. However, Perry takes us back to the original meaning in order to contest the idea that these uplands are the last untouched wildernesses on this otherwise acculturated and industrialised island.

The reason they look so otherworldly is precisely because of their exploitation as a natural resource

While it is undeniable these expansive landscapes are extraordinarily beautiful, the reason they look so otherworldly is precisely because of their exploitation as a natural resource. They are deforested, monocultural sheep farms, eradicating the possibility of biodiversity and sustainability. Shot on 10×8 film, these analogue photographs take on a painterly quality, the colours vivid and subtle, almost seeming to emanate light. Although these scenes are as the artist found them, they seem highly composed and allegorical like the paintings of the eighteenth century English – and Welsh – landscape painters. These large scale photographs combining painterly aesthetics with a hard environmental narrative, shed a very different light on the health of the upland landscape than one is accustomed to seeing in tourist brochures or romantic paintings and photography of the coastline. This is the contemporary meaning of these landscapes – it is not the horror of nature’s magnitude, of but of the scale and impact of human intervention that is truly sublime.

Môr Plastig (Welsh for ‘plastic sea’) is an ongoing body of work that classifies objects washed up by the sea into groupings. It is an open series of photographs ordered into Shoes, Grids, Abstracts, and others. While the archaeologist is able to identify and develop local characteristics from the place an object is found, the sea is a much more chaotic, and appropriate, metaphor for globalised industrial culture. A shoe that washes up on the Pembrokeshire coast might have been made in China and lost by an American tourist paddling on a beach in Portugal.

Perry gathers these plastic objects from the Pembrokeshire coast where he lives. This idyllic stretch of coastline has all the characteristics of the sublime and beautiful – steep cliffs, azure seas, crashing waves, quiet bays and rugged headlands. In contrast to the Wet Deserts, this series is a highly conceptual and minimal interpretation of the landscape genre. Where many artists on the coast will beachcomb and combine these found objects into anthropomorphic sculptures, Perry isolates this plastic detritus and takes photographs that hone in on the details and surfaces. His 15 photograph Bottles Grid of bottles washed up off the beaches of West Wales challenges all kinds of stereotypes: what it means to be an artist – a photographer – engaging with the landscape, particularly the Welsh landscape, especially the Pembrokeshire coast; it poses questions of repetition, serial reproduction, and the unique object.

Refusing the tourist brochure romanticism of the Welsh coastline

In many respects Môr Plastig connects to another eighteenth century genre of images, this time the taxonomical drawings of scientific enquiry. Floating on the page, divorced from their context, these images afford close study of the details and characteristics of the material and surface. The C18th drawings give insights into the object, but they also contain a cultural reference to the fact this expansion of scientific knowledge was intrinsically bound up with colonial expansion and the emergence of empire.

Môr Plastig addresses the state of pollution on our beaches and what we might be leaving for future generations, again refusing the tourist brochure romanticism of the Welsh coastline. It is a kind contemporary version of Graham Sutherland’s ‘Stories from the Sea’. Perry brings contemporary environmental issues to our attention, not a campaigning emotionally charged way, but through analytical examination and a reflective, poetic, manner which pulls the viewer in to think deeper about the subject.

The landscape is a fundamental element of how British (and specifically Welsh) culture and identity has been constructed, but in a way that is supposedly ‘timeless’ and mythological. The critical engagement with landscape in Perry’s practice makes landscape absolutely contemporary, shaped by industrialisation, agribusiness and the exploitation of natural resources. His work frees it from the abstract, alienating, and false ‘timelessness’ of a consumer based heritage industry and locates the landscape as an intrinsic part of contemporary culture and future possibility.

Land/Sea is curated by Plymouth Arts Centre and Ffotogallery. It is a Ffotogallery Touring Exhibition, supported by Arts Council of Wales.

Ben Borthwick, Artistic Director at Plymouth Arts Centre

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Astro Raggi is in the PAC Galleries until January 7th 2017.

This exhibition begins with the story of Pasquale Quadri. Or rather a story about him. Megan Broadmeadow first heard of the Italian optician, who was also a cinema projectionist, and member of a band, from a lighting designer friend. Already pieces of the narrative were drifting into myth — he was a chemist, not optician — but it is well documented that his frustration with the poor quality of stage and nightclub lighting in the early-1970s led him to invent the Astro Raggi, the first disco light with motorised optics and lenses that cast beams of moving light around the room. It is said that his mother used to help him build prototypes and mirror balls on the kitchen table, and gradually this homemade DIY endeavour evolved into Clay Paky, one of the world’s leading lighting companies. The exhibition does not tell the story of Pasquale Quadri’s life, but rather imagines his relationship to the machines he invented.

The Astro Raggi begins and ends the exhibition. Scenius (no.1 on the floorplan) is a domed sculptural installation that positions visitors inside the Astro Raggi, giving a disco light perspective of a dance floor. Could this be what Quadri saw in his mind’s eye when he created the Astro Raggi? Each ‘lens’ is a porthole covered in scrim onto which a video of a breakdancer is projection mapped, beams ghosting through the screens onto the floor to create a multiplicity of colours, shapes, and body parts. A classic Italo-disco song plays and the dancer’s repetitive moves have a machinic quality and at times he appears to be wearing a Cyclops mask which flares when he looks directly at the camera.Scenius captures the sensation of being on the dance floor in a dark club, so immersed in the atmosphere it is as if individual identity starts to merge with, or take on the characteristics of, the immediate environment.

Upstairs in Gallery 1, Cybernetic Love (no.8) develops the idea of desire creating an identity that is a fusion of the body, space, and machines. The video’s point of departure is the anecdote of Quadri’s mother assembling components on the kitchen table. A dancer performs a series of folding and kneading actions from the domestic realm that gradually morph into a robotic and industrialised hallucination. Her movements begin to echo those of the projector which throws the image around the room, as if video, dancer and projector are joined in ecstatic unison. The camera viewpoint becomes more and more immersive until, again, she is suddenly wearing a Cyclops mask emitting a beam of light.

Broadmeadow’s research for this project included a residency in Venice studying carnival costumes. The Cyclops mask makes reference to the 18th century Servetta Muta (meaning mute servant woman), a strapless mask with large eyes but no mouth — its wearer held it in place by biting on a button or bit — making pointed reference to the relations between the liberating anonymity and temporary identities conferred by costumes and carnival, but also the silent role of women’s labour in the domestic sphere and how it supports, even performs, the work of acclaimed men.

Be There Or Be Square (no.3) is a large sculpture made from lengths of metal truss used in lighting rigs. The mechanical sound of an attached robotic arm is offset by the percussive clank of suspended metal plates as they are dragged slowly across the floor. This mechanic assemblage takes on bodily qualities, its sound like rasping breath while the angles and shadows imply movement, perhaps shapes on the dancefloor. The metal plates are like industrial versions of the African masks so fetishised by Picasso and the surrealists, their anthropomorphic qualities implying either a tangle of bodies or a series of freeze frames recording a body in motion.

The possibility of bodies becoming machines and objects implying bodies is confirmed by the realisation that the plates are, in fact, fascias to another classic Clay Paky disco light, the Golden Scan, but also the same shape as the dancer’s masks in Scenius and Cybernetic Love. This oscillation between bodies and machines is perhaps most pronounced in the sound pieceSuperCallibrateOrganicMotionLightExposures (no. 5) that fills the space with the sound of moving-head projectors. There is something not quite right about the whirrs and buzzes — instead of clean robotic cuts, certain sounds end with a vocal quality betraying their source: they are a lighting technician’s impressions of his machines, rendered with the accuracy and affection of an ornithologist mimicking birdsong.

In the same gallery is Expo (no.6), a reconstruction of Clay Paky’s futuristic lighting booth based on an archive photograph of a 1970s trade fair. The final work in this gallery is When The Lights Go Down(no.7). This video, and Super Scan Zoom (no.2) downstairs in the cafe gallery, were both shot in the Clay Paky factory near Bergamo. These more documentary elements of the exhibition are supplemented by footage of Quadri’s band Scalo Farini, with him visible playing the Hammond organ.

The final gallery is only visible through a peephole. Having started the exhibition from the perspective of being inside the light looking out, Are You Dancing (no.4) imagines the mind of its inventor. The machine itself is privileged: an original Astro Raggi light that would normally be mounted high up on the ceiling is up close on a plinth. Its’ optics and lenses are so precise that in moments of clarity the lightbulb and filament are visible on the wall, bringing to mind the modernist machinery of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy’s 1930 electrical kinetic sculpture Light Prop for an Electric Stage (light-space modulator). But the smoke machine also hazes the room, transforming light from an immaterial projected image into an opaque sculptural form that occupies space much in the way of Anthony McCall’s minimal 1973 installation Line Describing A Cone, but for the disco generation. The peephole gives us a partial view of these shafts of angled light spinning around the room, evoking the futuristic aesthetics of 1970s sci-fi and alluding to the fact that while we can speculate based on the objects he left behind, we will never really know what this Italian chemist/ cinema projectionist/ musician intended when he imagined a nightclub of the future.

Ben Borthwick – Artistic Director

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A Review from Sullivan the Poet

Remarkable… Stimulating and enigmatic! Heather Phillipson’s installation is, as I came to understand it from my experiences amongst its constructs as a poet myself, a poem – or perhaps more a succession of poems – on the nature and current state of the modern psyche and its internalised view of itself and the world around it. The state of constant flux both within and between the two entities and their interminably changing relationship to each other. There. My opinion. Such is the overt complexity and boldly labyrinthine intricacy of this extraordinary work however; I have little or no doubt its next reviewer will see something entirely different at find themselves comprehensively at odds with every word I have just written. Such is the subtly chameleonic nature of this extraordinary creation… And in that is indubitably its conundrum.

Yet it captures the essence of change with the clarity and incision of an eye surgeon’s first stroke with the scalpel… Follow the installation through its numbered phases and absorb, immerse and engage with its subliminal messages; the thoughtful and precisely wrought video and the almost breathless delivery of the words and auto suggestions.

Stand silent in the centre of components 5, 6 and 7… And give yourself up to being overwhelmed by the messages that climb and scramble and clamour over each other for your attention and the audio visual assaults that crash down on you like a sensory tsunami before you try and make sense of it all. I did just that…

Then, as I did, go back to the beginning and start again. Discover for yourself a whole new installation; flexing and posturing as it moulds and melds itself, even through the continuity of mood and motif, into a new and undiscovered artwork. With a hitherto undiscovered plethora of fresh aural metaphors and visual similes to tease both the intellect and the senses… Its schizophrenic character and its multiplicity of perverse and gleefully unrepentant personalities.

I have deliberately resisted the temptation to attempt to define this singular work in every detail – for the experience of it will inevitably be as individual to each viewer as their own fingerprint. Therein, I believe, are its motives and its being – Its philosophy and its ‘raison d’ être…

Sullivan

TRUE TO SIZE will be available to view in the Plymouth Arts Centre gallery until September 30th

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