The avant-garde artist Yves Klein made his famous Leap into the Void, a spectacular fall from a high building onto the street below. Captured in a photograph, this astonishing image acted as a starting point for a selection of works by artists using text, photography, video and found objects that explored our physical imaginative capacities for escape. This desire to overcome our physical limitations is often realised through technology and invention, as in Philippe Ramette’s home-made apparatus for travelling through time. Fantasy and myth, offer another alternative for escape, as was explored in the work of Pierre Joseph and James Thornhill. Some of the works refer to professional, heroic achievements such as Fiona Bann’s narratives of the first moon landing.  Others refer to our failure to escape everyday existence as in Nicholas Bolton’s video Astronauts, which uses archive footage of an actual space mission with the artist’s own re-enactment of a walk-in space. This exhibition also captures the pioneering spirit and enthusiasm of the amateur in their attempts to make sense of the unknown.  

Artists include: Fiona Banner, Nicholas Bolton, Pierre Joseph, Yves Klein, Philippe Ramette, Eva Rothschild, Lynn Silverman and James Thornhill.