Night Crawling
Lou Bloom, the shady antihero of Dan Gilroy’s 2014 film Night Crawler, is the king of the ‘stringers’—a bottom feeding fraternity who obsessively scan police radios in search of blood and spectacle, racing to crime scenes to capture raw footage for broadcast news.
But Gilroy’s film isn’t just about Bloom—it’s about us: our late-capitalist hunger for sensationalist media, and the moral compromises we justify in the name of entertainment. Or art. Night Crawler became a critique of the contemporary media landscape. But it started as a film about American photographer Weegee, revealing how deeply art and the art world are implicated in its dynamics of exploitation.
Simon Attwooll’s house fire paintings bring us as close to the flame of a nightcrawling aesthetic as possible—without getting burnt. He calls them the ‘smokey boys’—a phrase you could easily imagine Bloom whispering in the shadows. These works are made using charcoal scraped by the artist from actual burnt-out houses, which Attwooll then puts through various processes to make haunting evocations of house fires. You could draw an ambulance-chasing lineage back in Attwooll’s practice to his Car Crash Compilation series of screenprinted collisions that drove headfirst into that same pileup of Ballardian aesthetics and ethics navigated in Gilroy’s film.
While Attwooll may have scorched his fingers recently, it wasn’t from handling the smokey boys—nor from the critical risk of appearing to exploit trauma or disaster. This isn’t disaster-porn art. Rather, Attwooll puts these images, tropes and expectations through various distancing processes to transform them into something more reflective, more ambiguous. He toys with the nightcrawler effect, rather than perpetuating or succumbing to it.
Like the car crash series before them, the housefire works move beyond the pure representation of a disastrous event or moment. Attwooll doesn’t prowl the streets at night looking for trauma, and never places himself or the viewer directly at the scene. The photographs that provide the burnt-out heart of these works are found, not taken, and the charcoal, while linked to specific sites of destruction, bears no direct relationship to the images themselves. There is no one-to-one connection between medium and subject—only a conceptual link forged through process and transformation.
The charcoal-dark humour coursing through the works also undercut their tragic charge. The punning titles (Indoor Outdoor Flow, It’s Not a Hole, it’s a Skylight) evoke the absurdity of real estate speak amid ruin. The use of matchbox trays—sometimes cut up and used as grids or cages to hold the images at bay— wittily reconfigure fire-starting tools as fire-retardant ones. These trays become both structure and smokescreen, nodding to both the modernist grid and the arsonist’s toolkit.
Throughout his practice, Attwooll has wrestled with the grid—sometimes submitting to it, sometimes breaking it apart. In Trace, the largest of the smokey boys, a grid of twelve panels form a ghostly composite of a single house fire. The grid here floats over the image rather than structuring it, but the tension remains: control versus chaos, containment versus combustion.
In advance of this exhibition, Attwooll conducted a controlled burn experiment to test or push these combustible elements. He used that resource of amassed charcoal to create an ashy wall drawing, over which he hung Trace. The charcoal quickly slumped off the wall, cloaking the entire space in a mist of black soot. The material refused containment—resisting both the grid and the architecture that sought to hold it. Whether the absence of this ephemeral element from this exhibition is a failure or a poetic success is left open. Either way, it speaks to the unpredictability and impermanence at the heart of this work.
Ultimately, this exhibition demonstrates a maker’s way of thinking and working through the possibilities of a subject. Attwooll is less interested in the moment of destruction than in its aftermath and residue. He does not chase the traumatic spectacle of the event but lingers in its echo—reconfiguring this moment into something new as a metaphor for human, societal and artistic renewal.
And yet, standing before these works, something primal and dangerous stirs. The smokey boys do not deliver us to a burning house—they take us to an even more charged space of imaginative encounter. Here we feel the pull of the grid and the heat of the flame, the lure of order and the seduction of collapse. We hear the quiet whisper of both the nightcrawler and the artist in these works. And we suspect Attwooll does too.
Hanging these works on your walls is dangerous. It invites the building to imagine its own destruction—to feel the heat and weight of its own potential fiery demise. That charcoal carries memories. This is the first solo exhibition in the new Hutch Gallery. Long may the gallery stand.
Curator of Screams is less a curatorial project than a slow-blooming cult. It is the unruly brainchild of Dr. Chelsea Nichols and Aaron Lister—two rogue curators bound by a shared obsession with the horror-shaped shadow of contemporary art. They speak fluently in screams, symbols, and subtext, drawing from horror cinema, gothic theory, art history, and the murky pleasures of the subconscious.