In Alex Davies’ The Very Near Future imaginary characters exist within an intricately constructed set, enabling the audience to experience a fabrication of time and space travel. This immersive work examines the perception of time and the role that cinema plays as a model for our own perceptions of reality within the cinematic process. In The Very Near Future audience members are made aware of our inherent internalisation of the cinematic narrative as, along with a film crew, they are caught inside a loop of time. 

Gallery visitors are invited to enter the installation where they pass through a series of physical spaces within a staged film production set. A cataclysmic shift occurs during the course of the production, resulting in a fracture of time and space that envelopes the cast, crew and audience within a series of time loops that rupture and distort the past and future for the audience. Through this rupture the cast and crew are preordained to perpetually remake the same film. Yet, with each cycle of the time-loop subtle variations of the film scene and surrounding events play out in each parallel perception.

*image (left)
Alex Davies,
The Very Near Future, 2013,
high definition CCTV footage of installation view, Carriageworks, Sydney,
courtesy of the artist