Ever heard of Simon Faithfull? Most people know the English artist for his quirky art pieces, especially his strange films and unusual installations.

Ever wanted to visit a Faithfull exhibition? Well now you can! Right near your doorstep. As part of the Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival, Harris Art Gallery is premiering his first ever exhibition of Recent Findings in the UK, which includes the black and white film, 0°00 Navigation.

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Aiming to question things which are fundamentally taken for granted, it shows a single figure with a GPS navigating a bizarre route – climbing through windows, crawling through hedges and walking on top of cars.

The lone figure is actually the artist and the bizarre route is the invisible Greenwich Meridian line explained museum assistant, Stuart Chadwick. “It doesn’t exist, but it’s there and most people that live on this line wouldn’t even know their houses are right smack on this line”.

However, 0°00 Navigation is not the only art piece to take the centre stage in this exhibition. Embracing old and new technology, his latest installation, A Murder, uses the humble slide projector to project Palm Pilot sketches of 80 crows from different cities, including Preston.

Well known for the sketches of his Antarctic trip in 2004, Faithfull has yet again delivered a simple, but fantastic set of sketches. Living together as a murder, the collective name for a flock of crows, Faithfull feels the social structure, squabbles and rasping of city crows mirror the manners and habits of the human population of the same cities. Preston crows are very secretive according to Faithfull!

Another highlight of this unique exhibition is the double screen projection, Aurora Borealis (Unseen). Planning to witness the Northern Lights, an impressive light display in the skies, he travelled to Finland to film the famous light show.

Instead he returned with a film made entirely from the reflection of his own eyes, including an image of the telescope used to observe the Northern Lights, the All-Sky-Camera. Failing to witness the Northern Lights due to cloudy conditions, the All-Sky-Camera still managed to record the light show above the clouds, which is also displayed.

Many other similar Faithfull art pieces are displayed, including the continually rotating 360° digital drawing, Revolutionary Postcard from Istanbul. Viewing from a small island on the Bosphorous waterway separating the Asian and European sides of Istanbul, it gives an impression of a no-man’s land between the two continents.

If you want to enjoy the exhibition’s delights then get there quick because the exhibition is ending on 5 June 2010.

image credit: Simon Faithfull, 0˚00 Navigation, 2008, DVD (Video + Super 8 transferred to video)