© juneau/projects/

Paul Dance triggers a battle of the bands and wrestles with lobsters during a visit to a fascinating exhibition that runs until Sunday July 2 at Wysing Arts, Cambridge.

Created partly in situ by the collective known as juneau/projects/, who prefer not to use their individual names, this fascinating exhibition comprises two discrete entities; ‘I’m going to antler you’ and ‘Beneath the floorboards of the forest, empty space’.

The former is a project resulting from juneau/projects/ working with two groups of young people to form two fictitious bands, The Ebony Angels and The Embers. Working independently of each other the groups were involved in every aspect of their creation - from t-shirts and cd cover artwork to the writing, recording and production of their songs.

Although the bands have never played together their recordings are set up (amidst a mass of plants and shrubbery) with equipment that is triggered to play by motion sensors. This creates a situation where the bands are in a ‘face-off’ without being present.

It’s an approach that questions notions of what a real band is, especially since these kids have been involved in far more of the causes of production of their music than many so-called ‘real bands’ ever are.

© juneau/projects/

The second project, ‘Beneath…’ is a computer game guiding you through a strange and at times surreal, landscape with the usual mix of problems, threats and options to negotiate. This piece examines the electrical items we use and the environment in which we find and use them.

The game is text-based so there are no visual clues other than the ones you make in your head. In addition to the text on the screen the passage is read to you through headphones. Some of the options are merely a matter of deciding which point of the compass to turn to – whilst others are of a more urgent nature - such as deciding whether to run from the chef with the blood-stained cleaver or to walk!

There are some rousing descriptions. Having landed on a raft and been carried downstream I was hit by an iron pole protruding from the water and suffered ‘the sour tendrils of pain and shock’.

Further on there were encounters with ‘large, bruised-blue prawns’ and a lobster, whose first action is to attack you. There is a very poignant description of a white stag in the forest whose face has been eaten away leaving only a skull and two eyes that stare at you before crashing down dead at your feet.

juneau/projects/ say they have ambivalent reactions to both technology and nature. They are city-dwellers who regard nature as “alien to us, beautiful yet cruel.” Yet their feelings about technology, despite its being familiar to them, is that once it is taken to a rural environment it becomes “useless, foreign and ugly.”

© juneau/projects/

A further piece on show deals with this ambivalence. In the Wysing café a video piece, Stalker, deals with their belief that destruction can be generative.

A portable DVD player mounted on the wall consists of a short – probably no more than 45 seconds – film of a marksman, normally employed to hunt deer whose task it was to hunt down a video camera mounted on a tripod in Grizedale forest, Cumbria.

We see the stalker walking softly through the trees then crouching and aiming directly at us, he fires. The picture blacks out and there is a harsh buzz as the camera is broken.

juneau/projects/ use various media including music, sculpture, photography and design to create their work and integrally important is the collaboration and participation of ‘ordinary’ people who not only view but create the work, as in ‘I’m going to antler you’ or interact with the work. as in 'Beneath...'

Wysing is an innovative place covering eleven and a half acres and they have just built six new, straw-walled studios for artists working on-site, in mediums such as ceramics and woodcarving.

Their aim is to be a modern, cutting-edge place for exhibitions such as Juneau. The next exhibition, by artist Renny Nisbet, explores atmospheric electricity generated continuously by global thunderstorms. It opens on July 8 and promises to be fascinating.