Scene 1 - The Crossroads

POV — The camera blurs on a distant glow, slow to focus, like eyes trying to adjust to the last light of the day. Close Up — a spider sitting in its empty web. Scenic Shot — A sunset is fading slowly over the blinding meridian.

A bird’s eye view— The camera glides over a vast, empty landscape. Tumble weeds roll over dead wooden railway sleepers left to slowly rot back into the earth. A felled forest used and beaten, discarded and left to be digested back into the dirt.

The temperature is too hot — heat ripples in the distance — there is dust in the air. The faint odour of motor oil grips like a rash. Long Shot - Smoke’s rising over the hill, the soot of a dying fire fills the air and the sky in the distance is lit with a fading orange toxicity from the setting sun.

(Title Super Imposed over the blurred orange atmosphere)

- THE ONLY VISION IS ZERO

-End Scene

Nicholas Cheveldave (b. 1984 in Victoria, Canada) lives and works in London, UK. Cheveldave creates densely layered collages which combine mediums such as photography, painting, sculpture, video and sound. His practice critically engages the ways in which Western consumer culture can generate and control the notion of identity in the present day.

The title of the exhibition, The Only Vision Is Zero, is taken from an advertisement printed in one of London’s daily commuter newspapers. This sentence’s innocuous, yet pointed corporate rhetoric, attempts to ignite the public’s trust in the belief that big business cares, luring us into false prospects of positive change and a more clean and stable future. What Matters To You, Matters To Us.

The climate crisis, economy and social injustices are considered hyper objects— “objects that are so massively distributed in time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity.” Media response to these subjects is often two-fold; portraying the immense scale of these issues through conflated narratives explained though sensationalised imagery in an attempt to help people understand what these things are, and how they affect us. Motion pictures have been using these themes for decades. Cinema must sell these narratives, as bleak as they are. After all, the post-apocalyptic, science fiction narratives that we watch on screen are becoming closer to the reality we are living in, with ever expanding forest fires, extreme heat records broken yearly and storms that reappear more powerful each time. Yet, in cinema, the story comes to an unrealistically simple resolve as a selected individual, or group of people, embark on the heroic act to fix the problem society itself has created.

The public is battered with millions of images daily of the climate problems we are facing, but the way to resolve these overwhelming narratives, and the ways of Looking Towards a Cleaner Future, Together, are becoming further abstracted each and every day.

14th of October - 6th of November