Creating a narrative of dissent this exhibition places the issues of history and class consciousness at its centre and further engages the relationship between commodity culture and community politics. It considers the balance between knowing and the shadow of uncertainty that looms over many communities in the harsh light of re-development and the concept of 'regeneration', a phrase treated with suspicion by those subjected to it. As local services are lost to restaurant chains and fashion boutiques, the valued aspects of familial ties, the bonds of generational history and local textures, aspects outside of economic rationale, are presented here as metaphor exploring the tension between an anodyne permanent Now with its surface sheen of steel, glass and sand-blasted walls which seeks to eradicate the voice of unorthodoxy with the distorting mirror of commerce, creating a sanctioned view of culture freed of the 'mess' of grass roots organic grow and replacing it with the blinding light of concrete piazzas, where reification objectifies social relations and isolated trees act as shorthand for a themed community environment.
A contradictory equilibrium of imbalance where commodity fetishism never quite collapses to the detriment of social cohesion, creating an unending cycle of addiction of want over need; a break up of societal values in the pursuit of the temporary high, a cycle of peer status that leads nowhere.
Existence is a social process, a value measured in human activity, the primacy of social relations: a place of memory and play. Here, a celebration of decay and the chance encounter. The luminosity of the shopping mall hides the reality of the dissenting voice, the call of the unseen, the periphery view, that which lies in the shadows and creates the world.
All roads lead to Piss Square. Embrace the rotting stench of life.
