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Place Making, Langwith College’s latest exhibition in the Norman Rea Gallery, succinctly combines architectural practice with political ideals and social comment. A mixture of photography, graphic design, collage, drawing, and sculpture is used in the month-long exhibition.
Visually deceiving his audience, Fitzpatrick aims to create what appears as preliminary work but is in fact a heavily laborious process. Lost is a Beckett-esque play on schizophrenia with the audience hiding on an upper floor looking down at a man who has come to a standstill. From our vantage point there is something rather powerful in having the answers and not telling but the tension strikes of 20th century themes and this carries on throughout the exhibition.
Solitude looks like a prop from Oscar-winning film The Pianist and when this comes into context most of the main room is decorated with images that are reminiscent of either World War II movies or film noir. Not that this has been done poorly, nor is it in particularly poor taste; The Second World War is experiencing a resurgence of late with films such as Valkyrie or Inglourious exploring new aspects of the great conflict and it is likely the artist had a lot to work with.
His sculptures seem to be his most honest side with good-cop/bad-cop pairing Fragmented and Frontier each themed around the segregation and the convergence of social hierarchy. Shards of glass held together by taut wire are meant to indicate contemporary tensions between the beer drinkers and the cake eaters, a symbolism not entirely lost in what is an impressive display of talents.
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