Love in the Misanthropocene at Palmer Gallery — Are Projectors the Aesthetic Way Into a Home Cinema Experience?
Installation view of Andy Holden & The Grubby Mitts' immersive exhibition "Love in the Misanthropocene", which continues at Palmer Gallery until October 30.
There is a lot to unpack about Love in the Misanthropocene, Andy Holden & The Grubby Mitts' ongoing exhibition at Lucas Giles and Will Hainsworth's thought-provoking West London platform Palmer Gallery, but allow me to say, the first thing that sprang to mind when I visited last Thursday was, simply: God, I could do with a projector. That's not to take away from the content of its multisensory setup — the opposite. If anything, the lo-fi, slightly grainy, retro-fueled feel of the images moving in front of me reminded me just how much cooler watching anything gets when it is not done on a TV. But back to Andy Holden & The Grubby Mitts!
As visitors make their way to the main exhibition room of the former aircraft manufacturing factory, a series of short films and animations appears intermittently on its white-washed walls, interspersed with headphone sets, cartoony painted scenes, quirky, metallic hanging bowls, sculptures, and more. To each screen, or projection, in the installation corresponds a track from Andy Holden & The Grubby Mitts' namesake album — a play on the state of alienation and the antithesis human-nature that characterize life in our digital-saturated times, recorded between 2016 and 2024. Informed, in equal measures, by today's non-stop news flow, current affairs' darkest side, and the influencers and memes-populated social media discourse, Love in the Misanthropocene strikes as a wake-up call. Through humorous lyrics, trippy landscapes, animals, and insects-filled visuals, and a transportative narrative, it playfully challenges our place in — and view of — the world.
