Bristol-based artist Mat Consume (matconsume.com/) presents Imperfect Multiples, a new body of silkscreen paintings examining the relationship between oil imperialism, the arms trade, and the military-industrial complex that underpins both. Asked 'Why now?' the artist said he just felt the need to do something.

The show takes its name from the nature of the silkscreen process itself — each print a near-identical iteration, slightly off, accumulating variance through repetition. The form mirrors its subject: the recurring logic of resource seizure, regime change, and weapons proliferation that has defined Western foreign policy for over a century.

At the centre of the work is the story of the Seven Sisters — the cartel of oil companies that carved up Middle Eastern resources in the mid-twentieth century — and the apparatus of coups, client states, and contracted violence that protected their interests. Works including Arabian Nightmare, In the Beginning Was the Oil, and I’d Like to Buy the World trace this lineage directly, mapping the collusion of corporate capital and state military power across decades and continents.

Other works in the exhibition turn to the cultural machinery that normalises perpetual war: the advertising language of military contractors, the gamified aesthetics of targeting systems, the bureaucratic distance that separates decision from consequence. Almost Midnight references the Doomsday Clock; Incoming (Shall We Play a Game?) borrows its title from the cold-war computer that couldn’t tell the difference between a game and the end of the world.

Consume works in the tradition of political printmaking — a medium historically associated with mass communication, accessibility, and dissent. The silkscreen, cheap to reproduce and impossible to make perfectly, is inherently resistant to the kind of pristine commodity fetishism that neutralises art as critique. 

Bill and Yvonne from Bristol CND attended the opening of this strikingly colourful yet thought-provoking exhibition - a timely show but not a comfortable one. The Gallery is within Rockaway Park, a creative hub described as 'A DIY Utopia hidden in the British countryside', with vegan cafe. These notes draw on a colour tabloid newspaper, produced in collaboration with contributors including CND and stanley donwood available at the opening.

The exhibition runs daily until 26 June. 

Rockaway Park, Temple Cloud, Bristol. www.rockawaypark.co.uk

Free entry