Babel explores the tower in all its forms, as structure, image and metaphor. Wayne Warren Jonathan Wright have created installations from unusual materials alongside photographs of historic and contemporary structures and souvenirs from around the world.

Water towers, pylons and lighthouses are placed alongside the desire to build bigger, higher and denser structures that involve the kind of hubris the Bible cautions against in the Tower of Babel.

Babel encourages a rethinking of structural necessity and the need to look beautiful .

Bury Art Museum, 18 June - 22 October 2016
Collaborative exhibition - Wayne Warren; Jayne Dyer

In the Country of Last Things Paul Auster presents a world where architecture and space constantly vanish, preventing individuals from building their own identity relative to the space they inhabit. An arena where matter is scarce and what is available is regurgitated until it becomes unrecognizable or depleted. Last Things at Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre documents fictional spaces about to disappear. The gallery attains a state of estrangement linked to the memory and the intimacy of that which is no longer possible, its visual impact both familiar and distant. Last Things parallels yet flips Foucault’s heterotopic space, where perceptions intersect, and the phantasmagoric, enchanting and passionate reach a point in which the alteration of reality becomes the narrative plot. A space of otherness which is neither here nor there... The exhibition evades immediate catagorization. Instead it is a narrator of stories or planner of enigmas. In purest Auster terms we are asked to construct our own narratives in the two gallery rooms. In this nothing is more simple and logical, but at the same time nothing is more complicated.

The artists have been selected as their work addresses the idea of ‘the mystery of life – what is reality?’. The curatorial concept focuses on the question of what constitutes the ‘real’ – ie the physical or tangible - as against the ‘unreal’ – ie the imagined. The Surrealists questioned the nature of reality in terms of it including the super-real – the metaphysical - or what is purely in the mind. Since then, we constantly address the notion of the virtual reality through the internet and social media, as well as movies such as The Matrix.

The Japanese author Haruki Murakami, often employs the co-existence of tangible and metaphysical reality in our illusions, mindscape or head-space which enable people to transcend the physical and exist in a ‘fabricated space’ – sought by, or imposed upon, the subject.

These works to be exhibited have been selected for their reference to such existences – either consciously via the artists’ intention or seen as such by the viewer.

It’s closing time for gardens of the west presents a blueprint to a possible future world... We are taken out of the everyday and enter into a disruptive phenomenological space, that offers a reflection on the long term effects of human behavior in relation to a global environment with dwindling natural resources. Our installation is ironic and evasive, reflecting on the underlying dualities and ambivalences that influence decisions and actions. It has both associative utopian and dystopian references, and presents conflicting notions of continuity and rupture, stability, collapse, suspension, preservation, transience, time and materiality.