Doom-scrolling versus doom-scrolling and isolation fighting fear. The new work at FACT by resident artists, Helen Flanagan and Gavin Gayagoy, will leave you traumatised, but you’ll smile about it later.
It’s a brilliantly embattling exhibition, throwing you under every bus on a journey to healing through exposure, and while neither artist is intentionally offering to collaborate with the other, they’ve been sharing space at FACT’s Studio/Lab for months, and its had an impact on how they’re portraying some of the most damaging pieces of modern life; both, in a sense summed up by alienation.
You’ve felt it. I’ve felt it. It’s inescapable. That absolute sense of loss of everything you know about yourself after two hours lost in pointless, un-affirming, un-helpful, clips on social media. The sort that crop up when you’ve been inactive for a while, so the algorithms present you with addictive nothings to draw you back in: aliens telling jokes that barely make sense, so you get lost in the comments; AI clips of glass fruit being sliced that make even less sense. But still you scroll.
Scroll because you’re hurt by the news, or by work, or just life, and it feels easier to get lost in unhealthy meditation. Scroll because somehow, distraction seems helpful.
In Gavin Gayagoy’s new work, that absolute abandonment of control is intense. Able to turn your head, as the game passes you by, but not turn back, or stop, or focus. The artist has literally created doom-scrolling-live, and some sick TV network will absolute see that a pitch for a show, and we will all watch it for the same reasons we watch Gogglebox. It’s nothing, and it kind of hurts, but its comforting at the same time.
I found myself genuinely challenged by that work, but it was heavily, heavily, influenced by my experience of Helen Anna Flanagan’s moments earlier.
Flanagan’s residency product is, as it describes in its wall panel, a resurrection of Tommy Cooper, and it. Is. Terrifying. The installation invites you in to the home of Phil, a Tommy Cooper impersonator, now living in isolation, at a loss for identity and meaning.
It’s stark. It’s dank. It’s morbid. And I’m not sure, at all, if its meant to be, which makes me even itchier.
The proposal to the audience is to consider class, culture and capitalism as hidden structures with constant pulls on our mental health. All I can think about since leaving (and I’m writing this after a week of just dwelling on it), is that its not that direct. Those things don’t impact mental health in turn. They impact our identity. Our job impacts our identity. And here we were, watching a film about a man who’s just at a loss because his identity was so wrapped up in this famous moment of one man’s death, that there’s nothing left.
And then there’s that weird feeling of guilt when you relate your own feelings to someone else as though they’re universal, when everyone’s struggles are unique. And somehow, its actually appropriate here.
If you want to be moved, challenged, and feel kind of lost in a way that helps (I think), Helen Anna Flanagan and Gavin Gayagoy’s show is worth every second of introspection it will cause you.
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Helen Anna Flanagan & Gavin Gayagoy’s exhibition is open until 23rd November at FACT
Words, Kathryn Wainwright
