Artist & photographer Will Lakeman said of the upcoming exhibition “I’m really excited for people to see this show, which I now realise I’ve been trying to make for most of my adult life. I have a really intense interest in a specific era of Fort Regent’s history – the funfair and swimming pool – but I have hardly any photos of myself there. I had to try and recreate my memories, and the more I tried the stranger the results became. The show involves photographs, reconstructions made with Artificial Intelligence, a soundscape, found objects and even some smells. Although it’s rooted in “the Fort” I tried to capture something universal in the experience of being a child, beyond excited to go to the leisure centre. I hope it says something to everybody.‘
The exhibition ‘PLAYTIME’ created by Lakeman is the recreation of the strange hold that childhood spaces have on our adult memories. This specific exhibition is centred around his childhood memories of fort regent.
Will Lakeman: ‘Through my work I try and communicate something of the weird, vivid sensations of my dreams and nightmares. I dream inside a world of intense colour and strange symbolism, but I also daydream in my waking hours as I drift around the place. I also experience synaesthetic hallucinations where my sensed become confused.’
Lakeman is a photographer who has nurtured an obsessive interest in ‘the Fort’, and has spent his adult life revisiting weird dreams of this iconic building and its heyday in the early 1990s.
The reason that this exhibition relates to the project of Nostalgia is because it invites the question of whether things are really as we remember or, as the term suggests, whether we cut out any negative aspects of the memory. Additionally, the fragmented and distorted nature of the AI pieces relates to the same imagery of our memories and dreams, where everything is displaced and misshapen.
Lakeman had also incorporated aspects of sound and smell to the exhibition to attempt to evoke the universal memories in any visitor’s inner child; the sharp smell of chlorine that immediately invites rich memories of the warm haze that accompanied it, the sound of children screaming and laughing in delight, even the comforting scent of buttered popcorn. As a very sensory-oriented person, Lakeman feels that this was the best way to recreate his memories as an experience that could be relived by any visitor.
Full Press HERE.
LAKEMAN WORK/EXHIBITION:
Lakeman’s images generated by AI connote a fantasy world, a fantasia. The use of his creativity and creating this illusion almost gives an escapism of reality. Audience that have experienced any of their childhood in fort regent would see this hyperbole fantasy that Lakeman has created. I overall really enjoy Lakeman’s AI generated photography as each image is designed to his own memories and the way and individual remembers their memories, each photograph is unique. It is interesting to see how he was able to transform a old and rather empty space and fill it with impossibly magical landscapes and fantasy imaginings.