Let me put it another way. You know that bit in The Matrix where a slack-jawed Keanu Reeves utters, with deadpan profundity, "There is no spoon."? Yeah. That.
Confused? You will be. But then that is one of the biggest draws of Jamie Shovlin's mind-mashing exhibition "Hiker Meat" which puts forward the question: "How do you re-make a film that never existed?"
The three floors of this exhibition are, in effect, Shovlin's hall of mirrors - and at the centre is a film by legendary Italian exploitation film maker Jesus Rinzoli - Hiker Meat: the slashery kernel at the heart of it all.
Except Hiker Meat is not a real film, and Rinzoli never existed.
Step into the first floor of the exhibition, though, and you may well be convinced otherwise. Detailed panels on the wall trace the story of Hiker Meat's colourful and troubled journey from inception to conclusion, full of juicy morsels relating to the highs and lows of collaborative film-making - from clashes of egos to disagreements and spats over plot-points and casting.
Equally convincing are the props (my favourite being the model of the giant worm, which provides the film's supernatural, teen-feasting terror, though the severed head comes a close second), posters and other ephemera that add to the credible narrative of this film that never existed.
Work your way up through the next two floors and the audio-visual installations deconstruct phase two: the remake of this fictional horror flick.
In the end, it was never Shovlin's intent to remake the whole film - budget constraints and personal inclination just two of the main reasons for not undertaking such a colossal venture.
However, in collaboration with writer Mike Harte (whose name, via the power of the anagram, provides the film's title) and composer Euan Rodger, a full screenplay was drafted, a soundtrack composed, and a prototype constructed using a collage of over 1500 vintage film clips that roughly matched each sequence.
The culmination of this real-life collaborative effort was the filming of the beginning and end sections of this prototype and a trailer for the film in the Lake District in June 2013 - all of which feature in Shovlin's feature-length debut Rough Cut.
Rough Cut is the bow on the beautifully-wrapped polystyrene-filled shop-display present, the cherry on the meta-cake: a documentary which showcases these sequences whilst also charting the behind-the-scenes of the gruelling seven day shoot and providing an insight into the group effort behind the wider Hiker Meat project.
Jamie Shovlin's Hiker Meat is many things, depending on where you're standing. It's a parody of and homage to a much-maligned but popular cult genre. It's a truly multimedia exhibition, bringing together sketches, painting, sculpture, video and film. It's a playful exercise in story-telling and an experiment in creative collaboration. It's an artist's game of Chinese Whispers and Russian Dolls, where truth and fiction collide and coalesce: where the line between reality and fiction is as solid as its watery reflection.
Ultimately though, it's not really important what is "real" and what is not. As Shovlin himself expressed to an initially befuddled yet captive audience, when he reads a novel he's not interested in whether or not it's real - he is more concerned with whether the narrative and the world contained within its pages is compelling enough to captivate the imagination.
But perhaps Morpheus said it best. No-one can tell you what Hiker Meat is. You have to see it for yourself.
Jamie Shovlin: Hiker Meat continues in Galleries 1, 2 & 3 until Monday 21 April 2014.
Catch Rough Cut before the exhibition closes on Sunday 20 April. Watch the trailer and book tickets here. Rough Cut is a Cornerhouse Artist Film.
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