Review of Playtime – Will Lakeman

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I recently visited the exhibition ‘Playtime’ by local photographer Will Lakeman at Capital House, St Helier to explore the theme of Nostalgia.

A little about the Exhibition

The exhibition focuses on Will’s personal fixation on Fort Regent, a now disused leisure and play centre in St Helier. During his childhood, Will visited the Fort, like most his age, almost daily alongside his brother Matthew (whose memory the exhibition is dedicated to). Since then, he often sees the old Fort in dreams and sometimes even in hallucinations, but never as it really was, due to the subverted nature of the brain’s subconscious. Therefore, the piece works to exaggerate and enhance the contrast between what he sees in memory and what was there in reality, and this is done through his combining of old archive photographs, his own images of the now abandoned site and the AI images he has made to recreate the subversion of his memory and dreams.

An AI image that recreates a vivid hallucination experienced by Lakeman as a child as he sat by the Fort Regent swimming pool, where he saw an inexplicable vision of gold and blue squares and the light from outside was almost blinding. Lakeman said that he chose to present his images on lightboxes because it allowed for them to ‘glow’ a little more, enhancing their colour beyond the capabilities of an unlit photo, which lends itself to the dreamlike quality they are imitating.

He has 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 quintessentially comforting scent of buttered popcorn. As a very sensory-oriented person, Will feels that this was the best way to recreate his memories as an experience that could be relived by any visitor.

This is just one of many original artefacts Lakeman was given by the Fort to present alongside his work. It contributes not only a visual element to the exhibition but also sound effects that will be familiar to anyone who holds memories of playing on a machine like this, which certainly epitomises the core of nostalgia; a feeling that is triggered by multiple senses. Additionally, this adds a further interactive element to the show, allowing people to almost go back in time and play this game again with the same sounds and smells surrounding them.

The reason that this exhibition relates to my 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 in lieu of a more rosy recollection. 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.

Here is Lakeman’s image of the swimming pool from the perspective of someone about to jump from the diving board. He said that this was a recurring dream he had, where he was faced with a diving board over 10ft high, although he said that when he revisited images he realised that it was no higher than 2 metres. To create this AI image, Lakeman admitted that he had visited the abandoned site of the pool to take an image that he could put into the AI engine and exaggerate. The beginning image was likely something like the one below.
As you can see, the AI image exaggerates the colours – ‘to create impossibly deep and blue water’ – as well as the space, which can both be attributed to Lakeman’s intentions to create dreamlike imagery.

My Opinions

I enjoyed the experience of visiting the exhibition because of its multi-dimensional nature and I found that the repurposing of spaces through AI to create a magical sort of parallel world really interested me as someone who visited Fort Regent a lot until it was shut down recently. It was so interesting to see the old and rather empty space be filled with impossibly magical landscapes and fantasy imaginings. I also enjoyed the incorporation of the multi-sensory experiences, and it was inspiring for me as it made me think about the wider possibilities of exhibiting because it can be a much more well-rounded experience than just a visual one. I think I would like to go back and experience it in a more calm and less rushed environment however as I felt that when visiting with school I did feel like I wasn’t there to really receive the art but just to find out information and take images.

” When you revisit an old memory it isn’t important for everything to make sense. Sometimes you just have to enjoy the ride. “

-Will Lakeman

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