Biennial Review: Fallout Factory

If you like your art to be fun and provocative, the Fallout Factory’s new show will be just up your street (Dale Street, to be precise).

To provide an antithesis to the Liverpool Biennial, their show, Response, forms part of the Fallout Factory’s Bregennial - taking its title from a fusion of the two founders name’s Reg Orme and Adam Bresnen.

It’s a tongue in cheek approach that is in keeping with the Independents parallel festival to the Liverpool Biennial, to stimulate discourse and raise awareness of the arts.

Response is in keeping with the gallery’ missive, to promote emerging artists through exhibitions and collaborative opportunities; to act as an incubation space and gallery for the creation and display of artworks, nurturing the creative process, through networking and resource sharing.

The show highlights different artistic mediums from opposing artists, works that will appeal to some but perhaps not all. The standout piece has to be Viktorija Grigorjevaite’s Untitled, the “Unexpected Guest”, a skeletal small corpse of a creature, comprised of animal organs. The piece boldly is laid out in the middle of the floor in a glass casket giving the exhibition the feel of a creative wake. Art sometimes isn’t what you see, but what you make others see, and this piece sits uncomfortably in the centre of the exhibition, a reminder of our own mortality.

Corey Bartle’s take on censorship is thought provoking and raises questions around identity and the masks that we all wear as part of our daily get up. However, the two singular pieces did not feel substantial enough; the viewer is left with wanting to see more.

Art that has to over intellectualise and explain itself is always difficult to digest and the two installations seemed to utilise wall space that could have been advantageous to other artists.

Curator Nicola Selsby has purposefully brought together a blend of contrasting artists in keeping with the Fallout Factory’s aim to be cutting edge, promote artistic opportunities and offer a platform for people to develop their ideas.

To 27 October
Fallout Factory
Dale Street