Globe @ Monument Mall saw the uncanny take to the high street in the form of Franko B’s ‘Love in times of pain: Sequence Two’ and Jock Mooney’s ‘Discontinued’. The installations filled the outside windows (facing Blackett Street) of the old Boots store at Monument Mall in Newcastle City Centre.

Franko B’s pieces were exclusively black, evoking life, vanity, death, eroticism and pain. The viewer encountered a taxidermist’s menagerie where long-dead animals perched for eternity on an array of found objects. Thick black acrylic covered both animal and object, like tar, binding them together in a beautifully haunting harmony. They became monumental, gloriously facing the viewer, their old selves hidden by impenetrable black cloaks.

​On the contrary, a multitude of Jock Mooney’s uniquely original, hand produced, brightly coloured sculptures were thrust together en masse creating a subversive shrine of sorts,  a contradictory vision that recalled votive offerings and video nasties, schoolboy humour and schoolboy error.

Evoking deeply dark feelings reminiscent of the carnivalesque, Mooney’s “products” invite the viewer to seek out the familiar and question the unfamiliar.

Globe Gallery’s offsite programme of exhibitions, events and participatory projects seek to bring creativity to disused shops and empty spaces in the North East. Exhibition was possible through special support of Neil Smith of Ward Hadaway.