JERWOOD GALLERY, HASTINGS Ingeniously manipulated images and films of people trying to fly or stay airborne give a humorous twist to the Icarus myth Icarus, in the Greek myth, tries to escape the island of Crete wearing wings of wax and feather. He flies too high and the sun melts his contraption. The dream of flight fails, a moment depicted by Bruegel in his masterpiece _Landscape __With __the Fall of Icarus_ as perhaps less heroic than absurd. Bruegel’s Icarus is nothing more than a pair of tiny legs, barely seen at the bottom of the picture: joke limbs vanishing into the ocean. This is very much the spirit of Mark Wallinger’s new show beside the sea in Hastings. Icarus everywhere presides. You see him made modern in a gallery of outlandish photographs of English men and women lurching into midair; in a sequence of films expressly titled _Landscape With the Fall of Icarus_; in a mirrored installation and an antic ballet on video. He is the inspiration for Wallinger’s ruminations on bodies moving through space and falling back to Earth. The smallest version of this event – the most modest flight, as it were – being the humble human leap. Continue reading...
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