Carl Slater: Crowd Control

Amidst psychotropic lighting and event-derived revelations, Crowd.Control revisits Plymouth’s 1990s rave scene. This was a specific, often overlooked, moment in Plymouth’s history when the city bore witness to the emergence, explosion, and decline of this perceived deviant subculture. Carl Slater’s new work makes parallels between rave’s Dionysian spirit and suggestion of a ‘higher’ experience and the familiarity of this idea from gospel worship and the search for salvation. In a peculiar turn of events that is explored in the exhibition, the spiritual home of Plymouth’s rave scene has since become occupied by televangelism.

Crowd.Control is the culmination of a three month residency at Plymouth Arts Centre and the first major outcome from this ongoing project. The exhibition is centred on extensive source material including flyers, first- hand testimonials, live DJ set recordings and digitally transcribed VHS tapes, alongside religious sermons and spiritual broadcasts. Slater restructures these disparate source materials into an hypnotic collage exploring the transcendental parallels of these two cultures.