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Dreams & Nightmares - RACA Youth Arts Festival Exhibition
 Leeds City Art Gallery (19 Jan – 26 Feb 2006)
I was surprised and delighted by the RACA exhibition which was evidence of so much more than the sum of its parts.
For six weeks, Leeds City Art Gallery hosted Dreams and Nightmares – an exhibition of artworks produced by RACA participants. This was no static display of pictures; this had everything… interactive sound installations, multi-screen video projections, a radio play, a ‘peep-show’ box and a 40-foot tall installation of over 300 photographic portraits. Watching the monitor image from gallery exhibition

The hanging works in the gallery stairwell - brilliant use of space and a very personal statement by participants at the very heart of the exhibition.
The Spiral of Imagination used photo portraits of every RACA participant, transformed them and arranged them in a dizzying coil along the café gallery’s spiral staircase.  
The masks - very strikingly presented and great fun in combination with the pressure pads.
Single mask image from gallery exhibition Down in The Black Room participants made masks that appeared to come at you from within the walls. Fiendishly hidden pressure pads beneath the floor triggered an array of eerie sounds.
I was so impressed by the chandelier of framed portraits, the masks and the Living Room.

In The Living Room above, transformed to look like a very unusual 1950’s lounge, a peculiar radio play Sadistic Sadie’s Medicine is heard quietly in the background, together with a specially composed soundtrack.

 The Living Room image from gallery exhibition
And even as we settled down for lunch in the café afterwards, the percussive music which accompanied it rattled through the ceiling above us.
Just a few feet away lies what appears to be a coffin. Approaching it you discover it’s a viewing contraption. Peer inside to see the specially made silent movie The Curse of Phantom Island.
It was really enjoyable – I just loved the primary children’s ‘silent movie’.
Lucid Dreams image from gallery exhibition Next door was the centrepiece of the exhibition, Lucid Dreams: a specially commissioned cycling multi-screen video installation featuring original dance and music from RACA participants across Yorkshire.
Frozen images clashed with moving ones; the everyday clashed with the surreal. Dance became more than dance as an ordinary looking school became the setting for a kaleidoscopic dream world...
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