Liverpool Biennial 2016:
Rosebery Street.


" Every conversation with you just goes... mental. And there's no one else I can talk to. I've seen all that stuff up there, the size of it, and I can't say a word. Aliens and spaceships and things and... I'm the only person on planet Earth who knows they exist. Oh, that's just not fair."
-- Rose Tyler, "Aliens of London."
Art When is the best time to view public or street art? When it's sunny or when it's raining?  Walking up Princes Avenue this morning towards Rosebery Street, the heavens were very much open for business, pitching water everywhere, making the world grey and dark green with highlights of muddy brown.  Hud up, head down, I was entirely confident I was in the wrong place at the wrong time to see Alisa Baremboym’s Locus of Control, another of the Monuments from the Future.

Even after viewing the piece, which sits on a patch of grassed waste ground, near some derelict house, I don't know if I saw it at it's best.  Certainly a sunny day would have led to the metal shining brightly, perhaps even other worldly.  But the wet weather meant the ground was slightly less accessible so there was a genuine effort involved in getting close and peering through the holes at the plastic construct within (which is also viewable on the artist's website).

From the outside the object resembles an environmental pod of some kind on an alien world, or a cage being used to encompass some beast.  The edges of the sculpture have begun to rust which speaks towards the idea of an object which is becoming part of the environment, as though abandoned by whatever it is which has made it.  Like the other monuments in this episode, if we embrace the fiction, it sits apart from the location inviting us to speculate on its origin.

Next Destination:
Toxteth Reservoir.

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