Press release:
Sober-Annihilated {Gallery} invites you to its premiere exhibition ~ MKUltra ~ a series of photographs by Ben Jackson captured during England’s period of Covid lockdown isolation that the artist spent in his hometown of Milton Keynes.
MK: Milton Keynes becomes a futuristic Delphian dystopia under the cinematic scrutiny of Jackson’s eye. Those oh so hopeful modernist plans of a ‘new town’ are dissected into sci-fi soot in every still, a kind of pewter cinder narrative radiating through his choice black & white palette.
But emerging just here & there from these abstract fictions are chance stippled eyes that gaze right through you with a sense of wild nothingness, what is outside of their window other than you? A confessional confrontation begins & the MKUltra of the exhibition’s title surfaces as its more foreboding proposition. If photography were ever an act of illegal human manipulation, this would be it.
A must visit for fans of Godard’s The Image Book {film} & Campany’s A Handful of Dust {exhibition series & book}, those who want to get lost in a collection of works that flow more like a visual composition of a plagued space & time that is almost already forgotten.
MK ULTRA
Austin Collings
MK: Milton Keynes. This is the non-place. The land of Nando’s. A paradise of parking lots, roundabouts and concrete cows. The architects who built me over 50 years ago were into weed and Pink Floyd. They saw a slice of Los Angeles dropped into olde worlde middle England. A mega-city. A declaration that England yearned to be something more than England. Something other.
They were visionaries or fuckheads or both or non. Non people. Non-place.
Then the piss-taking began. The Tories didn’t want me. Labour saw me as a totem of Thatcherism.
This is the non-place that was a joke place. But the joke’s on you now everywhere looks like me.
Who’s this man who takes pictures of me, this photography pest? He looks like Jerry Seinfeld’s son. He lives off Gregg’s doughnuts. He has fled to Manchester like so many others round here. But he returns to document me, to wander my soul. He’s seen something in me that others haven’t.
The beauty is in the walking. We are betrayed by destinations.