Long After Tonight Is All Over

Long After Tonight Is All Over explores the universality of music and dance and the idea of a group of strangers coming together to communally create something joyful. Music and dance are often central to the stories people tell about their lives and are recounted as moments of pure joy. The exhibition explores how music and dance have universal importance as part of our emotional lives and identities.

Parson’s work looks back over a lifetime of music and dancing, but often refers to earliest experiences of clubbing, when the experience was all consuming and free from the constraints of the phone camera. Curator Louise Peck describes, “The importance as a teenager of going out weekly, as memories are being formed through new experiences at such a formative age. The ritual of it; the preparation, anticipation participation and exaltation. Almost religious and, absolutely, religiously. How we couldn’t have been more ‘in the moment’ – no distraction or interruption from anything – with everybody completely present and the only way (pre-mobile phone) to ensure you connected with your tribe. All senses heightened and the feeling of freedom and escapism from school, or work, or life. This was the making of huge memories and experiences, but all these years later they almost feel out of reach, like fragmented snapshots”.

Parsons creates the imagery without recourse to photographic sources and describes how a split second can take years to describe through hundreds of different images. ‘Remembering glimpses of people dancing means trying into capture the most fleeting of sensations. But memory is inconsistent and unreliable, each image could be true - but there is nothing to prove or disprove their veracity.’

The artist has been listening and dancing to Northern Soul since he was a teenager, and it has been a lifelong obsession. He describes the profound emotional effect of the music and its combination of despair and elation. The paintings aspire to the emotional intensity of the Northern Soul songs they celebrate.

Northern Soul has always been an intergenerational scene, and it is very common to see dancers in their 70s alongside teenagers on the dancefloor. Parsons work considers how music and dance have the power to transport us, and this is undiminished by the ageing process.

Paintings like Nightclub 3, (Hacienda) describe bodies in motion, others, such as Nightclub 5, (Empty Dance Floor, for Hal Frazier) describe the liminal space of the edge of the dancefloor where people are between the roles of spectator and participant. This series of five giant 3 metre square paintings create an immersive experience for the visitor – creating a whole environment of movement and colour.

The painted sculptures have never been shown in the UK before and are inspired by the ability of baroque artists to concentrate movement into 3 dimensional forms. The figures are created from drawings of people dancing and attempt to capture the feelings of balance, weight and lightness of the body in movement on the dancefloor.

The exhibition is curated by Louise Peck, partner at print studio and gallery Advanced Graphics London, whose recent collaborations include The Magic is in the Tea at the Royal Academy of Arts and Albert Irvin: Autographic Marks at 45 Park Lane, London.