Day 779

The latest exhibitions in the former-aquarium-come-gallery were all tied to the theme of water and renewal. Out of five artists, the approach was taken in entirely different ways that all seemed to have accidentally joined each other further with the theme of oil spills.

Brittany McGribe did a daily preformative called "I Can't Stand To See You" that involved her and several plain-clothed actors diving into a large swimming pool of some oil-like liquid and emerging covered in seashells, screaming out the times of local tides. Some claimed that she never used actors and that they were just regular people who'd felt utterly compelled to partake in the scene.

Jason Bray created sculptures of children mixed with fish so that their facial features were distorted beyond recognition, not to mention any additional appendages like tentacles and dorsal fins. Each "Beach baby" as the exhibition was called, stood inside a large seaside diorama cast from bronze. Additionally he'd put pipes inside every sculpture so that their eyes, mouths and gills would pour with water that alternated between clear and black. Visitors have expressed concern with the animatronic side of the exhibit, claiming that the children's voices keep glitching but Mr. Bray swears they are only metal and water pipes, nothing about them could possibly produce speech.

Arnel Sarmiento used genuine frozen oil poured into the life-sized moulds of mythological sea creatures in a series he called "Mitolohiya at Alamat", or "Myth & Legend". It was partly preformative as he would begin each day by releasing the moulds and letting them hang in the otherwise empty aquarium as they melted over the course of the day. Again visitors would claim that the frozen creatures moved or blinked. Additionally the cleaners complained about the oily flipper marks outside of the tank and that each night of the show they would be found closer and closer to the main doors.

Alleah Levine used black hydrophobic paints on a 7x9 metre canvas that was raised and lowered into the old shark tank five minutes. It went down further and further with each dip until the final piece was revealed only to the visitors who used the glass tunnel beneath the tank. It was something like a shark's mouth poised inches away from a kill, scaled up to barely fit in the canvas and detailed enough to shock a visitor into giving birth right then and there (though debates are still on as to whether or not this was staged).

The fifth and final exhibitor was Felix Dustone who never showed up for the entirety of the exhibition. His work was a series of photos taken inside of a deep sea oil rig and depicted a strange mermaid-looking creature being slowly preserved alive in an oversized specimen jar. It's oil smothered scales and the solemn faces of the rig workers surrounding it gave the series a funeral-esque overtone that was further echoed by the glitched-out sounds of dolphins playing over speakers that hung inches above the visitors heads. That and the red tinged water that ran down the walls behind the images made it one of the more popular and mysterious images. Especially as the final photograph in the series seemed to be from the creature's perspective inside the jar as small human hands reached down through the yellowish fluid.