Gregor Wright @ CCA

Review by Adam Benmakhlouf | 10 Nov 2014

Is it weird to say the dinosaurs were down on their luck when the meteor hit? Prehistory and its misfortune come into contact in Gregor Wright’s Dinosaur Expert: I’m Feeling Lucky, along with the elements of a sci-fi narrative. 

Taking place across three rooms, in the largest there are Styrofoam figures amongst rubble and handmade earthenware dinosaurs. There’s the expectation that these standing roughhewn figures with their arms at their sides should be eerie, or that the plastic bottles in their eye sockets should be grotesque . Yet the lightness of the material and their undetailed form lifts them from the usual heavy flesh of monsters. Instead, they come entirely without confrontation as they face all directions, disorganised and blind.

Whereas the previous room with empty white walls feels overexposed, the final room comes as a bunker without windows and with a purple light behind a blind. There’s the sense of the artificial windows that decorated the underground offices in PlayStation zombie favourite, Resident Evil.

In the last silver room, small rocks or debris have been sprinkled onto sticky resin and set in several trays, the edges becoming the protruding frame. A gap is there, giving the sense that something more substantial was glued there, leaving only the shiny dried adhesive. They feel at the same time accidental and precious. With more pouring than painting in the latter, they come across as industrial, all with the same alluring title: Custom Colour Super Dream.

While there might be a narrative of disaster and going underground, each stage arrives differently than what might be expected. Though the rooms are set up as scenes, the works are by no means props. Instead, there’s an upending of the usual moralising and associations of predictably pitched 'what if' narratives, leaving something much more difficult to distinguish. [Adam Benmakhlouf]