Never Enough Notes e-zine // reviews + interviews + music

Down another side street in the east of the capital lies The Book Club, a gallery, bar and eaterie which is currently hosting a psychedelic photographic experience of the almost supernatural kind.

Natural becomes super under UV lighting. As you walk in, a lobster greets you on the wall, irridescent in a dance of bronzes, reds and dazzling oranges. Small light movements perform a delicate dance around our unknowing performer. He seems precious somewhat against the black.

Moving into the bar, fashion imagery strikes with the same intensity; poses are animalistic and brooding, the same lighting offering a different narrative than typical fashion photography. Blacks and blues shimmer against the futuristic stance of the models. Some are framed with bright props, their faces disjointed, unnatural, almost ghostly, a trick of unusual light.

In another image, the model looks as though waiting, her face etched with neon scratches of light. She looks away from us, perhaps ahead to something we cannot see, a future we are yet to know. Pairs stand, bewigged and knowing, painted in bright flashes.
Some of the images seem performative when displayed in small succession. A man sits, light like paint as clothing. In the next panel a woman stands, mysteriously on an orange square. The next they are united in what seems to be a dance.

The fashion images continue, offering a window into a story we are invited to peek and guess at. In others, the lighting seems to line the body, framing limbs and expressions into fluid painted renderings. The lighting makes them all seem ethereal, ghostly. Features shift. Some parts are clear, others blurred. Some parts are lost, others illuminated.

In the back (bizarrely by a ping pong table) the images go back towards the natural. Again oceanic, a crab is poised in blackness, the clarity strong. Less otherworldly than the others, it is a strong photograph, but slightly out of place.

Next to it what seems to be a coconut is an entirely different story. The lighting turns a normal object into one of fantasy; a completely different world. Knots and whorls become pathways and forests, a setting from a fantasy film.

A fish’s scales reflect the uv in a ballet of colours, its expression unimpressed with our interest. The eye glares, a blackened window in the poetic surround. Even broccoli becomes oddly magical, purples and greens becoming a forest landscape. Streams of colours drift behind. More pieces follow, turning everyday objects into those with apparently magical properties; a pear, asparagus, a knot of fresh ginger, and perhaps that is the point of the exhibition. To ask us to see with new eyes, to see as new again.