The Witching Hour will cloak Ealing’s PM Gallery in darkness for the next two months. Having appeared first in Birmingham, the show now ghoulishly manifests itself in London, with the updated subtitle, “Darkness and the Architectural Uncanny”.

“It is very exciting to bring the cream of the Midland art scene to London, to showcase talent from outside the capital,” says Matthew Price, the exhibition’s curator. This showcase includes Turner prize nominee Richard Billingham, alongside Graham Chorlton, Toby de Silva, Ravi Deepres, Chris Keenan, Idris Khan, Sally Payen, Ged Quinn, David Rowan and George Shaw. “We have refreshed the exhibition and added an architectural emphasis since the original show,” continues Price and, while the jewel-encrusted skeletons and morbid masks of the first exhibition were of clear fortean interest, the new exhibition plays on a more refined, atmospheric notion of spookiness.

Toby de Silva, (the artist, not the character from Casualty) shows ‘Haunted’, a video installation playing a cycle of eerie night scenes, accompanied by the stories of the spirits seen there. Although entertainingly menacing, there is a definite sense of tongues in cheeks; the report of the headless horseman, and the haunted lift which takes you to the bottom floor then follows you back up the stairs, cannot seriously be intended to chill the over-15s? A highlight for forteans though was the interference that almost ruined the video. Whilst Price muttered something about the wrong sort of wire, I reckoned I could detect a ghost in the machine.

Standing out amid the urban horror is a huge, mock-Renaissance landscape by the highly unusual Ged Quin. ‘The Heavenly Machine’ is filled with weird goings-on. Two mock-ups of Kepler’s model of the Solar System sit in the corners - one contains the beheading of Louis XVI, the other JFK’s assassination, suggesting perhaps that these events, spurred on by a cacophony of superstition, are really what comprise the fabric of man’s universe.

Richard Billingham, whose family photo album caused great waves in Saatchi’s Sensation exhibition, has surprisingly traded in the great humanity that characterized his work even last year at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery. Instead of colourful organic forms on low-grade film, here he shows dramatically lit, glossily printed architectural scenes. The near-perfect geometric composition of a graveyard conspicuously underlines the absence of living things.

It is this absence of a reassuring human presence that imbues the Witching Hour with atmosphere. David Rowan’s epic underground car park and factory scenes should be inhabited, as should Keenan, Chalton and Deepres’ otherwise familiar settings. Sally Payen’s ethereal figures become so much a part of their translucent environment that their presence is of hardly any comfort. It is what the viewer knows (or at least suspects) but cannot see that is the cause of nerves. Fear is projected onto a scene as much by the imagination as by the macabre history of each location. Whilst a pile of inanimate bricks and mortar should not feel threatening, it does during the Witching Hour.



The Witching Hour: Darkness and the Architectural Uncanny runs until 12 March at PM Gallery and House, Ealing W5 5EQ. Entry is free. Opening hours are 1-5pm Tuesday-Friday; 11am-5pm Saturday. For more information call 020 8567 1227 or visit the gallery website.