SEEK-PRAY-ADVANCE
WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU WERE THE CHOSEN ONE?
WOULD YOU EMBRACE OR HIDE?
IF YOU ACCEPTED YOUR FATE, HOW WOULD YOU TRANSMIT THIS NEWS TO THE WORLD?
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REVIEW BY CAL REVERLY- CALDER
Published in GARAGE /VICE
Space is hell: unfathomable depth, sheer emptiness. Stare into the abyss, as Nietzsche said, and it’s nothing that stares right back. Art has long tried to pave over this mental hole, soothing us by inventing creatures to populate the void. In the era when Galileo first saw Jupiter’s moons, Milton gave us the spacefaring guardian angels of Paradise Lost; in the dying years of the Space Age, Ridley Scott’s Alien brought us terror instead. But either way, these creations have been stabs at entertainment, ways of passing the time. Despite Frank Drake’s equation hinting at millions of civilisations out there, Enrico Fermi never received a proper answer to his question – “Where are they?” Government UFO surveys date back to the 1950s, the latest one being Harry Reid’s hunt, and still there’s no good evidence that any visitors have come. We seem to be all alone.
In the end, all our images of the “alien” are constructs—we learn about them from the big screen, feed them back into our imaginations, generate the same pictures again. One striking thing about the British government’s UFO files, recently released by the National Archives, is that the “flying saucer” shape has remained the norm for so long; you can date it to 1950s movies, and before that, 1930s pulp. Artist Megan Broadmeadow, whose show Seek-Pray-Advance is in its first episode at London’s CGP Gallery, has an eye for the mundane origins of these extra-terrestrial forms. Telling an obscure story of alien observations and close encounters, she’s fused a heap of weird stylistic tropes – B-movie staging, lenticular clouds, a mess of lurid New Age color – into an environment of self-satirical kitsch.
You enter the CGP Gallery through a giant snakehead, then zig-zag through low-lit mirrored corridors. On the walls are sickly-green monitors, displaying phrases like “people don’t snap into psychosis, they slide”; from the beginning, you’re anticipating a shock – it’s a horror script, a jump-scare funhouse. This isn’t to undercut the effect; all good space films are horror films, not just in the gory sense of Alien or last year’s Life, but the weird meditations of Solaris or Sunshine too. As Mark Kermode put it, since the 1960s intelligent cinema has known that “outer space becomes inner space.” When the mind touches the void, it recoils, and generates its own fear.
Entering the gallery’s main room, an “alien surveillance station,” you come across table screens set in small plastic frames. They loop a number of short silent films, collectively titled The Watchers, in which isolated people walk on distant clifftops and hills. The flying shots imply surveillance by drone; they catch up with the tiny human figures, zero in through a magnifying lens, and, as if making an inaudible call, transfix them on the spot. To give a backdrop to the air of menace, a screen which fills the facing wall is showing a vast, fuzzy cloud, occasionally lit by strobe lightning – more kitschy B-effects.
In the gloomy “mystic cave” around the corner, another large screen plays the film She’ol; this is the name of the Old Testament underworld, a grave for both the glorious and inglorious dead. Down in Broadmeadow’s version, an ‘Ordinary Person’ – who’s doubled as male and female, in a looping sequence – drifts through a series of crypt-like chambers and passages with iridescent, pulsating walls. Our boggle-eyed protagonist meets the ‘Anguine Twins’ – snake-headed creeps with beads for mouths – and the ‘Mother of all Personas,’ played by Broadmeadow herself. She wears a bright blue feather boa, and emits an aura of bobbly golden orbs.
Looking up at the night sky, all we can do is throw up our hands, and ask well, do you think they’re real? Episode 1 of Seek-Pray-Advance both asks that question and refuses to answer; in each of its elements, it leads a satirical double-life. Aliens, New Age visions, phantoms from other dimensions: these are both the things that adults believe, often fear, and also the things they condemn idiots or kids for inventing. Moments in this installation are eerie – the swooping camera in The Watchers, the boxheaded figures in She’ol – but when things are patently plastic, or stress their origins in a trope, they flaunt their artifice too.
Being fascinated by a belief doesn’t imply assenting to it, so Broadmeadow can have her kitsch both ways. From one angle, her alien environment is baffling and strange, and presages odd things in future episodes; from another, it’s already dead, a bunch of cheap replica objects. The moral is an earthier one. Without any evidence coming from intergalactic hell, our two stances towards alien life – sincerity and irony – can co-exist better as an account of ourselves. Put them together, as Broadmeadow does, and they tell you how doggedly we produce and recycle culture to keep ourselves distracted. It’s a hollow task, maybe – but for now, it’s all we have.
LINK TO WALKTHROUGH of QUAD exhibition:
https://www.derbyquad.co.uk/about/news/exhibition-explorations-megan-broadmeadow
WATCH 360 video - ABOVE THE FIRMAMENT online here:
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/383293493/988d321cba
REVIEW OF ABOVE THE FIRMAMENT:
Broadmeadow’s Above the Firmament (2016–19) stood out as an engaging work even when adapted to desktop viewing. Moving the mouse cursor or keyboard arrows, one could still explore Broadmeadow’s whimsical realm of figures masked and not masked, floating crystals, rocks and other formations. Having previously worked with VR art, I have a particularly appreciation for this interface, and could only hope I will one day have the chance to experience Broadmeadow’s in full gear. At one point, viewers stood among a sky of clouds, with no ground to stand on—viewing it on the desktop alone made my heart skip a beat.
Denise Tsui.
Peer to Peer: UK/HK Prompts Questions on the Execution of Art in a Digital World
SEEK-PRAY-ADVANCE was an interdisciplinary artwork comprising of installation, video, performance and sound. It unfolded as an episodic sequence during 2018-19 across the UK. The show launched at Southwark Park Galleries in London, before travelling onto Green Man Festival for Episode 2 (August 2018) and culminated with Episode 3 at QUAD, Derby in 2019.
Alongside conventional research Broadmeadow developed this work through an intensive period structured around a workshop-led process in collaboration with artists, singers and dancers. Through which Megan created a Sci-fi Choir whose performances at Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol provide the soundtrack to the exhibition and featured throughout the touring exhibition.
SEEK-PRAY-ADVANCE- EPISODE 1- EYES ONLY
CGP LONDON
March 2018.
An immersive, labyrinthine exhibition that explored the complex and blurred zone between religious epiphany, alien contact and delusional disorder. This intergalactic tale investigates the human condition of belief, asking if we are really ‘alone’; what about the others that exist within us, the others created by society; the others to whom we must listen and obey?
In this, the premier episode of Broadmeadow’s largest work to date, we are introduced to the characters of SEEK-PRAY-ADVANCE; an eclectic cast of players including The Ordinary Person, The Mother of all Personas and The Anguine Twins who all interact with a curious cosmic box, the contents of which connects the Earth and universe. Broadmeadow’s cast are developed from a wealth of mythical hybrid tropes, referencing 1950s sci-fi blockbusters, ancient scripture, Jungian theories and contemporary culture.
Episode 1 charts the beginnings of a new community on earth as observed by its governing aliens in space, ‘The Watchers’. The plot unfolds with the possibility of alternate realities in mind. Embracing filmic and stage gestures from classic sci-fi film and TV genres, Broadmeadow has created an immersive built environment within the gallery, creating an ethereal set in which we are transported into an alternative universe.
Alien landscapes are projection-mapped and enveloping, creating a scene for chance encounters with the cast in their own transcendental environment. Here we observe the birth of a new order, via an alien surveillance station and mystic cave.
This ambitious work stems from Megan’s ongoing interest in contemporary UFO religions, encounters, revelation and personal accounts of religious euphoria throughout history; charting parallels of religious epiphany and alien contact. The exhibition references imagery and experiences described in THE BOOK OF ENOCH, an ancient Hebrew text said to be one of the earliest records of alien encounter (ascribed to Noah’s great-grandfather dating back to 300 BC). Filmed at uncanny locations including Margate’s otherworldly Shell Grotto, we are transported into an alternative reality that is simultaneously both futuristic and nostalgic.
SEEK PRAY ADVANCE was been generously supported by:
CGP London, Green Man Festival, QUAD Derby,
ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND, The GANE Trust, The Paul and Louise Cooke Foundation, The Arnolfini, Chapter Arts (Experimentica Festival) and online Patreon Supporters.