Star date: 4th November 2018

SELF EXAMINATION AND EXAMINATION OF A CITY AT CAUSTIC COASTAL

Top artist, Emma Talbot, who's exhibited everywhere from the Tate St Ives to the Freud Museum London, brings her extraordinary show, 21st Century Sleepwalk, to Caustic Coastal on Oldfield Road until 1st December. It features dreamy, psychey hangings and installations that tie the pain of personal regeneration with the regeneration of Salford. It's a superb show that should make you think.

Full review here...

So, on a pink stage there's two mannequins of women with their legs open taking a selfie...whatever. Out of the window, in the near distance, you can see the famous Dirty Old Town gas holders being demolished...Shock! Horror!

What ties these together? Birth, death, re-birth...revulsion in certain quarters. Sharing the stage in Emma Talbot's show at Caustic Coastal is a tortured looking baby, as stray placentas are scattered around...and the women don't look too pleased either, their faces hidden behind black masks.

Slogans on childishly rulered lines are festooned on an illustrative vagina...'You are born'... 'Your cries echo'...It's the human soup screaming for attention and affection at the beginning of a life journey...'Don't feel ejected'...'Not rejected, detected or elected'... 'You will ask - Why am I here?' Quite. 

If this is the personal quandary, downstairs, past dreamy, sleepy sketches, are huge silk hangings where the personal gets political, and the links between the developer orgy going off in the area surrounding the gallery become apparent. It's alienation a go-go.

As perplexed children climb some unknown surreal beanstalk there's questions everywhere about the state of the psyche and the state of Salford...'What have you been promised? Eternal upward mobility?'...'What are you reaching for? Something that sits just beyond you that moves as you move, unattainable illusion'...'How do you like your city's endless pinnacles and compartments, its arcades avenues studios circuses and cells? Its gates and barriers?'...

There's more. Loads more questions, done for you, that question what the fuck is going on...'Do you see yourself reflected in the glazed facades? In what way have you been co-opted? Are you the sleeping partner? How have your reactions been apprehended?' ...'Does self medication make life more interesting or blank it out? How is the counselling going?'...

...And one that isn't a question... 'A city is built on all that has been mined, buried, plundered looted borrowed'...And the iconic gas holders in the near distance continue to be trashed...

One of the final slogans on the hangings is 'Do you keep thinking there must be another way'...

Keep thinking.
 
21st Century Sleepwalk by Emma Talbot is on show at Caustic Coastal until 1st December Thursdays and Saturdays only between 1pm and 5pm.
Caustic Coastal is at Unit 2, Regents Trading Estate, Oldfield Road
M5 4DE

For further details see the Caustic Coastal Facebook page – click here