Flooded London

Flooded London exhibition is held at Medcalf Gallery in Clerkenwell presenting a series of images depicting Squint Opera's long-term view of how London’s population has adapted to raised sea levels. The general scenario is set 80 or so years into the future, long after the sea levels have risen. The catastrophe side of the sea coming in has long since past and the five images are snapshots of people going about their lives, long since having adapted to the worlds new circumstance. The scenes shown through light boxes present London as a tranquil utopia with the architecture of the distant rat race suspended below the water.

The people in each scene appear to be relaxed and happy in their environment and in the first we see a man who has rowed into St Pauls and is preparing to dive off the ledge of the whispering gallery into the dimly lit ‘swimming pool’. Another sees the upper reaches of a once famous art gallery where people have collected pre flood artifacts and are rigging them up to get makeshift machinery going to power a light bulb. We assume that the world is a much less complicated and that there is not much in the way of industrialized manufacture. The original City is shown as the now abandoned Canary Wharf where two women are fishing out of the side of an office and the sail of a boat going down the street.

The installations are optimistic and reveal that far from being a tragedy, the floods have brought about a much-improved way of life to the capital city.

Squint has used photography, 3d modelling and digital manipulation to imitate some of the techniques of the super-idealistic Victorian landscape painters. Details are exaggerated and play with scale to present images that belie their composition.

There will be an evening event held at Medcalf with Squint/opera on 18th July 08 to celebrate the exhibition.

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