Ever Growing, Never Old: Toby Paterson and a Soviet obsession

Matthew Hull gets a taste of the former Soviet Union… at a roadside gallery in Manchester

Pavement, a window-front art space set within one of the city’s university campuses, provides a free, instant hit of art to students and passersby alike. It seems apt, then, that this roadside gallery should play host to some Soviet flavour – a series of photographs by artist Toby Paterson of the modernist housing blocks and municipal buildings of the former eastern-bloc.

In Ever Growing Never Old, Looped, Paterson’s photographs are projected on rotation for a few seconds each, and the resulting film captures the particular brutalist beauty of post-war construction projects. In one image, for example, an air vent has been used as the model for a tile pattern that covers an entire exterior wall, with the metal outlet hidden in a crowd of concrete copies. In another, a zoomed-in shot of a tenement reveals crenulated ramparts and bulging balconies worthy of a fairytale palace.

Paterson admits that when he set out to photograph the architecture of the former Soviet Union his aim was ‘not to see the iconic things, but instead to see the stuff that has fallen through the gaps’. Paterson, recently appointed principal artist for the 2012 Docklands Light Railway extension, captured the images during a series of research visits to Sofia, Krakow, Dresden and Moscow between 2006 and 2008. ‘I suffer from the pressure, when I’m at home, to be in the studio for the different kinds of projects that I’m working on,’ he says, ‘so this process is a weird space outside of that, the chance to take five days to go out and walk around a city’.

Paterson sees real advantages to being exhibited at Pavement’s public ground floor space. ‘It makes the work analogous with the experience of making it. Even if people don’t stop and only see two images, it’s akin to my modes of operating on those wanderings. The film is there to be noticed if someone is open to noticing it. The sequencing of the images is such that someone who passes it every day is unlikely to see the same image, unless they stop and watch the whole 15 minutes.’

Whether you do wait to watch the entire film, stop to take in just a few of the images or even just tilt your head to look as you walk past, Ever Growing Never Old, Looped makes for interesting and thought-provoking viewing. As you walk on from the exhibition don’t be surprised if you start seeing the buildings you pass in a whole new light.

Ever Growing Never Old, Looped, Pavement. Until 6 June (4pm – Midnight daily). Free entry. Image and interview: courtesy Amy Smith at Pavement.

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