NORTHAMPTON.- NN Contemporary Art is presenting Gothic Revival, a new audio-visual commission by Jarman Award-winning artist, David Panos. Part film, part musical score, Gothic Revival is a poetic exploration of place; a cinematic tapestry that interweaves digitally manipulated footage with film, sound recordings and fragments of video collected in Northampton.
The artist’s process began through exploring the connections between Northampton’s Gothic Revival architecture and the legacy of its post-punk music scene, which birthed the band Bauhaus, credited with initiating the ‘gothic rock’ music genre. Seeking to explore the descendants of such an ‘alternative scene’, the film documents local band Raven Rust, whose rehearsal of Bauhaus’ most famous track, Bela Lugosi's Dead, recurs across the piece, almost as a modern act of establishing tradition through repetition.
Panos engages with the town’s often overlooked voices, seeking to understand the complex dynamics of identity, tradition, and meaning in such contexts. He contrasts DIY scenes like the remnants of the alternative/gothic subculture with archaic, institutional structures, exemplified by a choir rehearsing at Northampton’s All Saints’ Church. The work contrasts these two very different musical spaces – however a paradox unfolds where modern, socially liberal ‘alternative’ signifiers and pre-modern religious structures can both be evoked by ‘gothic’ forms.
The commission was an opportunity for the artist to engage with the concept of the British town in contrast to a London-centric artworld; Northampton in its historical specificity but also the site as emblematic of contemporary regional Britain. Gothic Revival resonates with Northampton as a fractured microcosm of the challenges faced by small towns and communities in post-Covid, Brexit England; the assemblage of sound and image unraveling the complexities of a society grappling with a crisis of meaning. It raises questions about the preservation of cultural traditions, the decline of communal spaces, the clash between progressive and conservative values, and different attempts to create spaces that do not conform to market-driven rationality. The film questions whether cultural formations like Christianity or ‘gothic/alternative culture’ still resonate with the contemporary world and secretly hints at the possibilities of new ‘post-romantic’ forms that might offer us some escape from the impasse of the present. Gothic Revival is a poetic meditation on the way that historical imagery can lead to very different cultural expressions, as well as a piece about how music, even though it might speak of another time, can open up a space of transcendence.
Commissioned in the run-up to the opening of 24 Guildhall Road, Northampton’s major new capital project – a five-storey cultural hub with multimedia galleries, artist studios and a civic reading room, set to open to the public in 2024 – Gothic Revival will be presented as the final installment in Sensing Place, the gallery’s year-long contemporary art programme that explores connections between individuals and the environments that we share.
