Art Reviews

Beastly Machines

03/11/15

This rough and ready exhibition at the Time and Tide Museum in Great Yarmouth is unapologetic in appearance, bold and active in its presentation and sarcastic and witty in its execution.

On entering the first room, you are greeted with dim lighting, clunky mechanical beasts and the sounds of churning clogs and gasping steam pumps. It is a place of play where humour and allegory are pinnacle in displaying the artist’s satire, fun and inventive manner.

Interactivity is the key to the work displayed. As you pull on levers, press buttons and wind up pedals, metal grates and screeches and the industrious anthropomorphic figures come to life before you. It is a refreshing display of kinaesthetic proportion, engaging a younger audience with fun and interactivity, and an older mind by the earnest undertones to the pieces. 

With Canoodling Gnus, Pigs That Might Fly, Shopping Centaurs and Thrush Hour Bikers, the exhibition is well worth a visit. The most enjoyable thing about it is its salvage like feel, factory presence and less than prim greeting. It feels gritty and grimy and more honest in its reflection on the real beauty of nature; not its false dainty and elegant connotations.

This exhibition is not about convenience or ease; it is about working for what you see and making such an event of it so that it is more fun. This attitude stands out against the age of contemporary technological culture and juxtaposes the lazier styles that have come to resemble some exhibitions we often engage with today.

Whilst I enjoyed many of the pieces on show, one of my favourites was White’s adaptation of Edward Lear‘s The Owl and the Pussycat. For me, it demonstrated White’s love of pun and is a tip of the hat to this exhibition’s talent to combine and harmonise the mediums of word and expression with 3-D aesthetics.

The culmination of these creative practices makes this collection capable of appealing to a variety of audiences and been able to speak on the dual voices of informality and sincerity.

Johnny White’s ‘Beastly Machines’ will be on show at the Time and Tide Museum, Blackfriars’s Road, Great Yarmouth until 21st February 2016. 

Check out this video about Beastly Machines https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvXsuCTCzsc