The art show was based around the concept of the unseen, divided into the literal and the figurative.
Stepping past the threshold brings you to a room that smells faintly of iron and formaldehyde. Pitifully thin wires suspend the entirety of a horse, dissected down to its basest components as guests walk past self-inflating lungs and a steadily beating heart that fills the room with its low thumps.
A narrow passage forces guests to walk single file past glass panes that alternate between explaining the process of mummification and leaking canopic jars. The room they walk into is filled with three dimensional portraits of the backs of people's heads. Some are split with axes,scalpels and worse still embedded in them while others remain pristine and so lifelike you half expect them to turn around.
From there a set of stairs leads guests into a hallway seemingly suspended above a void and surrounded by a Faraday cage that arcs whenever a certain noise level is reached. The act of seeing their words produce raw lightning unsettles them, creating the perfect atmosphere for the final two rooms.
As the stairs reach their climax, guests flee into the penultimate room. A room that explores the harsh chill you experience upon meeting someone who is somehow not right in ways you won't be able to place until you search for their name online and see that they've just been released from prison for "accidentally" killing seventy eight dogs at the same veterinary clinic you took your own dog to just last week. Every inch of the room is filled with portraits that aren't right, aren't natural in their own unique way, be it that the mouth reaches both sides of their face at rest or they have three smaller sets of eyes surrounding their normal sized ones.
The portraits gradually shrink in size and fade until they meet a corner that leads them to the end.
The final room is pitch black. A member of staff ties guests hands together with cable ties so they form a human daisy chain, a conveyor belt of anxious nerves that slowly file into a space that feels to very large and empty and occupied all at once. It feels like they are walking into the last place they will ever experience and nobody makes a single sound, some going so far as to hold their breath because it just feels like there's something waiting for them in the dark.
What they will not be told until they are exiting the building, escorted by police past a heavy metal barrier, is that they were never alone in that last room. There are nine ambulances on scene, two leaving and five more pulling in. Everyone who has left the gallery is immediately drawn into an ambulance and presumably taken to a nearby hospital.
None are seen or heard from again.
Whatever was in the final room is never spoken of, not by the authorities at least.
All staff from the gallery ere replaced the next day and it was never discussed again.
Stepping past the threshold brings you to a room that smells faintly of iron and formaldehyde. Pitifully thin wires suspend the entirety of a horse, dissected down to its basest components as guests walk past self-inflating lungs and a steadily beating heart that fills the room with its low thumps.
A narrow passage forces guests to walk single file past glass panes that alternate between explaining the process of mummification and leaking canopic jars. The room they walk into is filled with three dimensional portraits of the backs of people's heads. Some are split with axes,scalpels and worse still embedded in them while others remain pristine and so lifelike you half expect them to turn around.
From there a set of stairs leads guests into a hallway seemingly suspended above a void and surrounded by a Faraday cage that arcs whenever a certain noise level is reached. The act of seeing their words produce raw lightning unsettles them, creating the perfect atmosphere for the final two rooms.
As the stairs reach their climax, guests flee into the penultimate room. A room that explores the harsh chill you experience upon meeting someone who is somehow not right in ways you won't be able to place until you search for their name online and see that they've just been released from prison for "accidentally" killing seventy eight dogs at the same veterinary clinic you took your own dog to just last week. Every inch of the room is filled with portraits that aren't right, aren't natural in their own unique way, be it that the mouth reaches both sides of their face at rest or they have three smaller sets of eyes surrounding their normal sized ones.
The portraits gradually shrink in size and fade until they meet a corner that leads them to the end.
The final room is pitch black. A member of staff ties guests hands together with cable ties so they form a human daisy chain, a conveyor belt of anxious nerves that slowly file into a space that feels to very large and empty and occupied all at once. It feels like they are walking into the last place they will ever experience and nobody makes a single sound, some going so far as to hold their breath because it just feels like there's something waiting for them in the dark.
What they will not be told until they are exiting the building, escorted by police past a heavy metal barrier, is that they were never alone in that last room. There are nine ambulances on scene, two leaving and five more pulling in. Everyone who has left the gallery is immediately drawn into an ambulance and presumably taken to a nearby hospital.
None are seen or heard from again.
Whatever was in the final room is never spoken of, not by the authorities at least.
All staff from the gallery ere replaced the next day and it was never discussed again.
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