WE ARE THE ANGRY MOB!

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A lot of important things happened in 2007, from the first iPhone being released, to the surge of 30,000 troops being brought into Iraq from the U.S. Alongside all this, Kaiser Chiefs’ indie rock track, ‘The Angry Mob’, was released, discussing the way in which society keeps people under control via the tabloid media and an established 24-hour drinking culture. The first exhibition of 2017 ironically utilised one of the lines from the song, connecting the works within the show under the exclamation, ‘WE ARE THE ANGRY MOB!’ The exhibition features Martin Kellett’s silent video compilation ‘Cinecuperation’, a mashup of slightly dated television adverts, transporting the viewer back in time to their consumerist past. As the film continues on one sees more and more adverts geared towards the idea of the other, considering the notion of the unique self, culminating with a family of clones in a seeming utopia. Also on show is Dominic Ewan’s looping video ‘Angry Mob’, a simple animation harnessing the ‘angry’ emoji commonly used on the social media platform, Facebook. The endless screams from the disembodied heads functions as the only sound for the show, adding a new layer to Kellett’s seemingly unobtrusive advertising experience. A photograph from Matt Greenwood’s series of prints titled ‘Field Work’ bridges the gap between the two videos, documenting a simple structure that no longer exists. Maybe this becomes a flimsy metaphor for the lack of television we now watch as a society due to the advent of streaming services?

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Curated by Bob Bicknell-Knight