UK born, Melbourne based artist Mysterious Al’s largest exhibition to date; SPOOKHOUSE.
The two part exhibition featured over 70 works integrated within an immersive art experience inside a re-imagined active fairground ghost train and presented within a complimenting pop-up exhibition space.
Set within a vast Collingwood warehouse, SPOOKHOUSE - a 12m long, 4m high set piece containing the ghost train - was a world first concept. To partake in the experience, visitors were invited to climb aboard a rickety cart and journey through a twisting labyrinth of animated characters, paintings, projections and special effects.
Honouring the traditional ghost trains of the 1950s, all the props within the ride were created using traditional materials such as paper mache, UV lights and plywood, combined with more current technologies including sound effects and spin machines. On disembarking, visitors moved to the accompanying pop-up gallery space featuring more of Al’s paintings and paper works.
Mysterious Al’s practice aims to challenge how people interact with art, where and how they see it. Like a Pixar movie, there are often two subtexts.
Across the 10 day period, we saw just shy of 5000 visitors attend the exhibition. This result more than tripled the attendance of Al’s sold out “Blinking into the Sunlight” 2019 show .
Despite the challenges of COVID restrictions and interstate and international tourism at an all time low as a result, visitors attended from Melbourne, surrounding regions and interstate visitation from NSW and QLD. Proving these types of experiences are inclusive and accessible to all, visitors ranged from a few months old up to 80 years old.
Al required our expertise to take this immersive art experience from exhibition to live event. Across 12 months we were engaged to manage location scouting, experience choreography, venue management, marketing, ticketing, staffing and overseeing publicity.
Our publicists generated 61 media hits across the campaign, reaching an average of 2,829,917 people.
Highlights included features in Broadsheet, The Age, Domain Review, Traveller, Time Out and Thrillist.
Other radio interviews with Mysterious Al were placed on ABC Radio Melbourne, Triple R, JOY 94.9 and more.
See the after-movie below.
Artist. Mysterious Al
Creative Event Production by us
Set Build assisted by Callum Preston
Lighting by Clearlight Studios
Prints by MilkBar
Venue provided by HoMie
Publicity by Zilla & Brook