Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
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Nathaniel Mellors, ‘First Blood’, film still, 2005.
Courtesy: the artist and Collective Gallery.
Collective Gallery, Edinburgh
25 June – 30 July
Reviewed by: Juliana Marie Capes
‘Hateball’, an exhibition of new work by London-based artist Nathaniel Mellors, functions as a disordered society of videos, sculptures and props where each element distracts from the next. In a quirky installation where seemingly the individual’s place in society is questioned, this group of artworks is anything but equal.
Fighting for prominence, and finding solace in its clever placement, is the central video of the show, Macgoohansoc. Projected onto a blank canvas, this engaging work is informed by the 1960s TV series The Prisoner, a surreal drama set in a seemingly idyllic society where an individual’s desire for freedom is punished by a menacing white ball – the ‘Hateball’ to which the exhibition’s title refers. The video evokes the feeling of a party political broadcast on behalf of the ideologically easily led, its chief protagonist spouting comedy fascist slogans and turning the themes of The Prisoner into inane and hilarious soundbites. Whilst the film’s soundtrack fills the space aurally, struggling for attention are two further videos that rather obliquely offer up the death throes of a Polish supercomputer, Brighton beach and bad poetry. These nestle amongst copious abstract sculptural meanderings and the central props from the main videos: the aforementioned Hateball and Mellors’ blood-stained leotard, which is next to be seen starring in the final film projected onto the back wall of the starkly empty second space.
In this atmospheric piece, Mellors repeats the final monologue from the film Rambo – First Blood. Emoting the fury of Stallone’s character against the society that pushed him to his one-man war, we see Mellors writhing in a shower of fake blood. Positioned at the end of this confusing yet intriguing exhibition, and in the absence of a map to enable a better understanding of the artist’s world, the relationship of this piece to Macgoohansoc is the final victor in this battle of Mellors’ cultural influences.
Writer detail:
Juliana Capes
Venue detail:
Collective Gallery
22-28 Cockburn Street, Edinburgh EH1 1NY
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