Westworld

Exhibition runs:
29.7.12 – 19.8.12
Sat. – Sun. 12:00 – 18:00

Private view:
Saturday July 28th 19:00 – 21:00

Artists: Russel Chater, Factice (Ludovica Gioscia & Corinne Felgate), Jade Heritage, Joey Holder, PLAZA (Oliver Herbert & Edward Simpson), Julika Gittner, Matthew McQuillan, Sophio Medoidze, Jon Purnell, Ben Seymour, Lex Thomas, Jonathan Trayner & Stephanie Dickinson, The Unstitute

The show is accompanied by a publication with contributions by Ben Seymour, Shama Khanna & Nina Manandhar, Jade Heritage, Beatrice Schulz, Emily Rosamond

In Michael Crichton’s 1973 feature Westworld, a high-tech hovercraft transports selected guests across a desert zone into the hyper-engineered oasis of a secluded adult amusement park. Westworld allows its guests to reinvent themselves as sheriffs and medieval knights with limitless powers for the duration of their exclusive vacation from reality.

Similar to the artificial world imagined in Westworld, the multinational shopping centre group Westfield has successfully paved its generic fiction of an ideal commercial city over countless brownfield sites across the globe, including the recently opened Westfield Stratford in East London. Crowned with its own postcode E20, Westfield Stratford is a carefully controlled environment that is entirely shielded from the daunting reminders of recession and social deprivation that mark the surrounding reality of Stratford’s existing urban landscape.

The automatic exclusion of context coupled with the desperate simulation of 'life' that characterises large scale corporate environments such as Westfield is surprisingly reminiscent of your average 21st Century art institution. Assuming that Westfield must therefore be the perfect space to show art, Scare in the Community wants to imagine what it would be like to put on an exhibition at the shopping centre. The artworks in Westworld indulge in escapist fantasies of a perfect consumerist world where everybody is rich, healthy and eternally entertained...

Westworld is curated by Scare in the Community.