Is global travel empowering or does it inspire isolation? This is the question, as well as many others, that HOWL Projects are inviting us to answer this weekend at the ONCA Gallery. HOWL Projects ‘delve into the vast, bizarre and threatening system of global travel. Through live participatory illustration HOWL invites Brighton to join in a satirical and creative appreciation of easy-jet culture’.
“In an increasingly busy world we understand that holidays are one of life’s most precious commodities. Not too long ago, the world wasn’t much more than a set of sprawling deserts. Nowadays, sand dunes give way to Skyscrapers. The global individual can no longer count on a stable environment; he is doomed to be exiled. The challenge is to produce a semi-autonomous system that can detect, identify, monitor and report a range of physical threats in an urban environment…Expanded Global Communication systems allowing simultaneous experiences of utopia, consumption, culture and poverty: where you can see the swerve of deviation appears as the principle of all reality.”. This exhibition is part of the two-year participatory arts programme called Navigating Change. The programme explores themes such as rewilding, citizen science and climate change.
Four artists and illustrators have created an interactive installation transporting us into a digital suntrap, exploring the global network and travelling the long road to the apocalypse. HOWL Projects is an art and illustration collective working mostly within the field of ‘pop surreal and low brow art’. They launched in Berlin in 2015 and have since exhibited at Doomed Gallery in Dalston, London. Their aim is ‘to create exceptional art events, push the boundaries of contemporary illustration and find the corners of the contemporary practice where some might fear to tread’. The artists coming to the ONCA Gallery this weekend are Pete Murgatroyd, a prizewinning illustrator whose work has appeared in numerous publications, Stuart Blackamore, Mr Mead, who has just illustrated his first major book and our very own Briget Meyne, an illustrator whose work covers a wide range of subjects including alternate dystopian universes. You can find out more about the ONCA Gallery here, and HOWL Projects here.
Holly Martin
