Entry: Free
I love big cities, but they can be scary places. While there are plenty of horror movies about city-slickers being menaced by inbred country-folk, but I can't recall many films that effectively show just how menacing a place the city can be – both overcrowded and isolating, both overly-ordered and a chaotic maze.
The Witching Hour: Darkness and the Architectural Uncanny, (to give it its full title), is an exhibition of photography, painting and film exploring just how strange and disconcerting the urban landscape can be. It contains works by ten artists from the West Midlands, all different in style and execution, but all focusing on urban environments and their often-sinister atmospheres. Highlights for me were works from David Rowan's Pacha Kuti series, (but then I find car-parks unbelievably creepy anyway), and from Idris Kahn's Every... series. For the latter, Kahn takes all of Bernd and Hilla Becher's photographs of a particular type of industrial building, (for example, spherical gas-holders), and superimposes them into one single image, half-solid and half-ghostly.
Unfortunately, while the content of the exhibition is good, it's let down by the lighting. The excellent, excellent lighting. The PM Gallery has three large skylights, windows along the tops of all the walls, and artificial lighting. It's a very well-lit room, which is excellent for the unframed oil-paintings on show. However, the photographs are all behind glass and most are dark, shadowy images. The result is images that are obscured by reflections no matter where you stand. It's very disappointing and doesn't do justice to the work on display at all.
Once you tire of peering at your own reflection you can always look around the Pitzhanger Manor-House next door and experience the architectural uncanny for yourself. Its high-ceilinged, minimally furnished rooms would make good sets for a horror movie.
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