SF and Art: ‘Is This Planet Earth?’

By Angela Kingston

‘Is This Planet Earth?’ is an art exhibition that is intended not for humans but for aliens. They visit us in the future but arrive too late to see nature in reality. Life on earth – wiped out by global warming, mass-extinction and contamination – now exists only in the imaginations of artists.

Halina Dominska has created a large-scale silicone sculpture with hanging fronds or stamens. These ‘breathe’ as visitors approach, and ‘pant’ as we get closer. There’s a video by Helen Sear, of a hallucinatory pool of water, and at the same time a quivering, single-celled organism. It seems to want to pull you in…

Katherine Reekie has painted pictures of laboratory specimens: seaweeds that eyeball us; birds with insect limbs; children’s toys mixed up with animal and vegetable DNA. The final, mangled life forms on earth? Seán Vicary has animated some limpet shells, to make them dance. But what if their patterns and shapes have always, unknown to us, been a form of cryptic communication? Patrick Coyle will conduct a tour of a futuristic water-bottling plant, the ‘Wrecksome Flottlesam Statiom’: radioactivity has seeped into the water supply and pure water is a luxury item.

Salvatore Arancio presents us with mossy growth and fungal flesh, all of it exaggerated in scale and made in lushly coloured ceramic. Alfie Strong provides a pile of soft sculptures with photos of rocks with red shadows, navy-coloured water and wrong-looking plants. A soundtrack by Jason Singh features bird-song, croaking frogs, a babbling brook and more. But all these noises were actually made by Jason, a beatbox artist.  Dan Hays has painted some dazzling, pixelated landscapes – they are highly technological and perhaps even cyborgian in feel.

The exhibition ‘Is This Planet Earth?’ is a work of science fiction. It pays homage to visionary sci-fi writers and filmmakers who conjured with apocalyptic landscapes and creatures (J.G. Ballard, John Wyndham, Douglas Trumbull, to name just a few). And it assumes, for a moment, sci-fi’s ecological mantel, challenging us to stop and think, as this planet’s supreme consumers and polluters.

Curator: Angela Kingston