‘Stone gives way to metal and glass,
Glass gives way to turbine and propeller;
Time is the absolute, definitive force of change.’
IN 2052 I WILL BE 85 YEARS OLD.......if I live to be that age. That is a daunting thought; that my short time upon this earth will be done, never to re-exit, forever dead. As on many occasions before, I think about the closing montage in ‘Gangs of New York’ where we see in the foreground the two graves of the main protagonists; and then as History and Time surge forward and the cityscape evolves and grows in the distance, the two head stones slowly become overgrown, begin to crumble, deteriorate and then disappear forever taking away all and any knowledge of those that lay there; their deeds and the stories of their lives.
For a while now I have been following a website called Terrafugia; a design company that designs flying cars! This is the stuff of which science fiction is made. Things we maybe only dreamed could happen and yet it is and now. Locally, I have witnessed the old rail yards in Gloucester slowly transformed into another shopping mall, known as ‘the Triangle’ with a futuristic logo standing proud at the entrance of another 1000 car parking space. This is ‘Back to the Future’ – revisited, the history of Hill Valley - again; another city, another town undergoing metamorphosis as Time races by.
These artworks are about Time, about change and the fragility and mortality of Man. We witness a dark, brooding landscape, an England born out of a war with Germany; unsettled, bad feelings since WW2, where twisted ominous buildings and constructions overshadow the places where people gather, in their everyday lives; eating, shopping and working. Posters of British films –Now Showing, – ‘Get Carter,’ ‘Mona Lisa,’ ‘The Time Machine,’ ‘Quadrophenia,’ ‘Dr. Who and the Daleks,’ – films deeply set within our country and our culture adorns the billboards reminding us of an England that once was. Hitler - Big Brotheresque, portrayed as a Templar Knight, the very image and iconography of the EDL clearly illustrating a hatred and confusion of ‘hatred and confusion,’ – knitting together the very fabric of a multi-racial, immigration problematic religious driven society.
The locations featured in these images are known to me; places I was brought up, places I went to school, would shop, - places where I played Saturday morning football, worked, drank, had friends. It is no coincidence that in the ‘Quadrophenia Shopping centre’ plate that the building not only resembles the Shard, the tallest building in London, but also takes the form of the Statue of Liberty in the final scene in ‘The Planet of the Apes.’
TIME WILL TELL.
What the future holds for us as a society and a people, a species and a planet, it is hard to speculate. With the recent I.S. terror campaign affecting most and everyday lives, I for one, only fear the worst.
Mark S. Masters - December 2015