All That Is Solid Melts Into Air - Laing Art Gallery

Jeremy Deller, who represented Britain in last year’s Venice Biennale, curates a new Hayward Touring exhibition opening on 12 July 2014 at the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne. In All That Is Solid Melts Into Air Deller takes a personal look at the impact of the Industrial Revolution on British popular culture and its persisting influence on our lives today. The exhibition combines contemporary music, film and photography with a vast range of 19th century images and objects. Deller approaches this wealth of material like a social cartographer, revealing the ley lines of cultural history. Deller explores how the trauma of the Industrial Revolution and chaotic urbanisation affected British society, focusing on emblematic figures including Adrian Street. Born into a Welsh mining family, Street rejected a life in the mines to become a flamboyant androgynous international wrestler. Also featured is James Sharples, a 19th century blacksmith and self-taught painter from Blackburn, famous for his much- reproduced image, The Forge; and music from industrial towns whose roots can be traced back through generations of workers in factories and mills. The radical transformation of the landscape in the early industrial era is powerfully evoked in Victorian images of factories ablaze at night, shown alongside the Laing’s own 19^th century apocalyptic painting, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by John Martin. Industrial folk music, the incessant rhythms and racket of the factory floor, heavy metal and glam rock, permeate the exhibition in sound installations and film.  A Hayward Touring exhibition from Southbank Centre, London.