Blink, and you’ve missed it.

Looking Up, a loop of Pat Flynn’s CGI-animated shorts, marks the opening of Wonderful Electric, the new digital installation space at Blackburn’s Fusebox. Designed to provide a secure berth for a series of art installations, Wonderful Electric itself was developed by Alex Zawadzki and Jamie Holman, partnered as Uncultured Creatives, as the antithesis to the kind of gallery whose trappings communicate an air of class exclusivity, whose facades present art as a dead language; the kind not taught at a state school.

What was once an electricity substation has also seen service over the years as both a night shelter and a venue for gigs, and its new fittings reflect elements of its history, most notably in the form of a new stained-glass window, derived from older promotional material, depicting electricity in safe hands, and the Wonderful Electric neon sign itself, seaside-familiar and retro-modern.

Flynn, the inaugural exhibitor, describes the rendering of computer generated imagery as akin to sculpture, a sort of time-lapse architecture in which the artist works with both form and motion. For Sweet Tooth’s denatured landscape, he changed the way his virtual camera makes sense of space, altering its way of seeing, so that tatters of monochrome untether over it like harbinger birds in murmuration or murder; a nuclear autumn to follow the gluttony of times that endlessly demand more, until there is nothing more left than the end.

It is, perhaps, the sequel to 2022’s M.A.G.A., fleshed out at a time when a second Trump presidency seemed like dystopian science fiction rather than today’s increasingly dystopian fact. A simple visual metaphor, with something of the flavour of an editorial cartoon, it depicts a skull in a ‘Make America Great Again’ baseball cap, crying a river of rainbow tears.

The piece which responds most explicitly to the space, specifically its ceiling-mounted video screen, has yet to be named. In it, Flynn refers to a more celebrated ceiling, that of the Sistine Chapel, by appropriating the hand of God reaching out to that of his mortal image in Michelangelo’s Creation Of Adam. The two co-exist on separate faces of a sign, which, once it is set spinning – like the familiar optical illusion of a bird in a cage – brings the two together through the phenomenon of persistence of vision. This, of course, is the same property of the human eye that seems to bring motion to a series of slightly altered images in more traditional hand-drawn animation. Elegant in its concision, it’s a Möbius strip of endless self-referentiality, invitingly witty rather than off-puttingly clever.

As an opening statement, it seems to strike exactly the right balance, suggesting that Wonderful Electric will be more than just a flash in the pan of Blackburn’s cultural kitchen. It will be instructive to see what it cooks up next.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: copyright Pat Flynn