The Zero Hour
In The Zero Hour George Blair’s photomontages highlight dystopian aspects of the present, and apparently absurd but possible futures. They tackle the banality and soullessness of everyday life; a zero hours contract man waits forlornly by the phone. Robots, the new workforce, commute by train. Some humans, gradually morph into robots while other humans become their pets. A robot partners a pregnant woman. Have robots completely replaced men?
Artist Profile(s)
George Blair
George is a Londoner and has a degree in Sociology from Leicester University. The Guardian called his first solo exhibition “excellent”. He went on to exhibit extensively in the seventies and eighties, in the UK and abroad. He was published in the British Journal of Photography Annual, and his many photomontage postcards, capturing the impact of unemployment in the Thatcher era, sold in huge volume and continue to do so. He resumed his work in 2011 (after years head down in the day job), and finds many of the previous images are sadly topical again, and the British Museum will exhibit them in 2019, as part of the Jeremy Cooper postcard collection, provisionally entitled The Postcard as Contemporary Art.