Managed to finally make it down to High Society last week, it is an interesting exhibition at the welcome centre charting changing societal relationships with drugs along with visual art inspired by drugs and drug culture. Some highlights included the webs of spiders created when the spider was under the influence of certain drugs:
and a small drawing of a star chart by the superb artist Fred Tomaselli. Tomaselli often embeds pills, capsules, tablets, weed and cannabis stalks into his art work before glazing the entire piece in resin. One of my favourites of his is the expulsion:
High Society is definitely an appealing premise but disappointingly there was very little exploration of contemporary drug culture. Surely the rave culture of the late eighties and early nineties and the explosion of the use of the ‘love drug’ ecstasy demands more attention as well as the current constantly evolving internet legal highs such as mephedrone and all its re-incarnations continuously created to avoid illegality. Unfortunately these glaring omissions leave the spectator with many unanswered questions.
