This is Nottingham recently Reviewed the 1%-ers show 'Banality & Big Questions' as part of NOTLOST festival, the full articale of which can be seen below and also on the This is Nottingham website. ANNUAL visual art festivals have come and gone in Nottingham over the past few years. Remember NOW? You Are Here? The latest stab at showcasing the strength of independent creativity is NOTLOST which, rather like the late-lamented You Are Here festival, extols the simple joys of living and creating here – rather than somewhere like London – with the words "we are not lost. We are in Nottingham. This is our island."
Backed by the Orange Tree and cash from the Lottery and the Arts Council, the three-week festival sprawls across a diverse range of venues across and beyond the city including Surface Gallery, Malt Cross, the Orange Tree, Crocus Gallery, Backlit, Spanky Van Dykes, Oldknows studios, the Sumac Centre and Nottingham Society of Artists.
One new venue brought into being for the festival is The Hideout at Fishergate Point near the London Road roundabout, which has been hosting an impressive show by self-proclaimed art supergroup the 1%ers.
The group was last seen in the city at Surface Gallery but has pulled out all the stops to convert a former auto repair unit into a gallery complete with concrete floors and deep storage rooms.
Curator Allan Binns has assembled a range of paintings and installations, the most noticeable of which is a full-size garden shed surrounded by model rail track. Look through the shed window and you see that the whole thing appears to be a joke about male-ness.
There's a lone man-mannequin sitting in his shed, watching a TV which is showing live footage taken from a camera on the train.
However, there is much more here to feed the mind and eye. Installations alone include Clare Hebert's sinister Miss Fortune – a glammed up fortune-telling automaton – and Emma Gamble's White Elephant, inspired by the scene in Werner Herzog's film Grizzly Man where Herzog warns the former girlfriend of Timothy Treadwell, who was eaten alive by a bear, that she should destroy the recording made of the incident or it will always be the white elephant in her life.
Here, Gamble displays this part of the dialogue and adds only a large screen showing white nothingness – the great white elephant of death? Nearby, curator Allan Binns' own work includes the flickering olde-time image of a woman in erotic pose, endlessly repeating itself to a sleazy jazz soundtrack.
The installation, titled Womb Tomb, is shown in one of the store rooms, viewers kept at a distance by an imprisoning barred door.
There is plenty of 2D photography and painting in the show too, with three canvasses by Paul Patrick Morrison, which flag up his intention to deal with everyday horror by portraying sprawled corpses.
Recognition must also be given to Sam Etchell for his traditional painted landscapes.
As one can perhaps tell by now, this show, titled Banality and Big Questions, has been put together without a unifying theme. But as a showcase for regional artistic creativity it does the job just fine. This is our island indeed.
NOTLOST Festival continues until July 23. Details can be seen at www.notlostfestival.co.uk
