Please click on the link below for the UCA Maidstone Students’ degree show. The event represents end of an era as this is the final graduating cohort of the Video Arts Production, formerly Time Based Media, course that has been running since 1988.
My new film, Polytunnels, is premiering at Media City Film Festival, Windsor, Ontario, on May 24th:
http://mediacityfilmfestival.com/films-and-schedule-2013/
An e-publication about my work, consisting of an essay by Al Rees, an interview with Jeremy Rigsby and Oona Mosna, Media City’s directors, and an essay by myself, will also be published on the same day.
I will be showing Rings at an Analogue Recurring event at Lo and Behold, London, on 25th April.
Rings. Four 16mm black and white loops for four projectors, approx 15 minutes, silent, 2012.
Rings revisits a format I devised for a student work I made in 1974: 4 X LOOPS. Four identical loops play a repeating, one-second long animated cycle. The projectors are moved into a variety of configurations during the work’s duration, generating pulsating patterns of light and pseudo-movement. Each performance is different. This will be its fifth.
I will be talking with William English about the future of film and related issues, and playing some film-related music (and some not) on his programme on Resonance FM, on Friday 29th March from 2.30 to 3.30pm. Resonance is on 104.4 FM in London and at http://www.resonancefm.com online. William’s programmes are archived on his website at http://www.williamenglish.com
New artist’s book.
400 word essay printed in Letterpress on a single page, folded around ten hand-stitched pages of digital photographs of a building in Seoul. 20cm high x 14cm wide, with hand-stitched card sleeve. ISBN: 9780957079755.
Printed by Jonathan Jarvis, designed by Sam Francis and published by bookRoom Press, UCA, Farnham, Surrey, UK: http://www.thebookroom.net/. Thanks to bookRoom Press director Emmanuelle Waeckerle.
Available from bookRoom or directly from me, price £20.00.
Some images from Neil Henderson’s film event Black and Light Movie, 2001, 5 minutes, for 50 Super 8 projectors and a few Standard (Regular) 8 projectors too. Neil presented the film several times over the weekend of the 2nd and 3rd of February, as part of the show: Film in Space, an Exhibition of Film and Expanded Cinema, held at at Camden Arts Centre, London, and selected by Guy Sherwin. This was one of a number of events that have augmented the exhibition, which runs until February 24th.
In previous presentations of this work, Henderson arranged the projectors on a double bank of Dexion shelves. Although the projectors are arranged in an orderly fashion, they are angled at the screen so that the frames vary in size and shape, overlapping in a variety of configurations. At Camden the arrangement was completely different, in that Henderson made use of the floor and a spiral staircase in the room. The film is delightfully paradoxical in that all the projectors are loaded with black leader. They are turned on and for some time we see only the light from the projectors’ lamp housings and listen to the whirr of the fans and motors. After a while the films start to run out, releasing skewed, superimposed rectangles of light onto the screen. When all the films have run through the projectors are turned off. Thus the piece poses a number of questions, such as when and where is the “film”, is it a film if there’s no “image”, is the rectangle of light an image? And so on. It is quite a pure time based work, in that we are waiting for some while for what we know will happen, but equally it’s very much a work of light and space. These photos were taken at the first presentation. For the second and final one, the take-up spools were removed from the projectors so that the film snakes onto the floor, while dangling and dropping from the machines on the staircase. Apologies for the blurriness of the last picture, in which Henderson can be seen on the right.
This event, which takes place on 6th February at the Horse Hospital, Bloomsbury, has been organised, and contains work by, former MA and current research students from the department of Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, and one visiting lecturer (myself).
A major show of Expanded Cinema installations, paintings and sculptural works: Film in Space, curated by the filmmaker Guy Sherwin, opened on December 17th 2012 at Camden Arts Centre in North London, and runs until February 24th 2013. Films, diagrams and notebooks by older filmmakers; Malcolm LeGrice, William Raban, Chris Welsby, Gill Eatherley and Annabel Nicolson, are shown alongside work by younger artists including Simon Payne, Emma Hart, Denise Hawrysio, Louisa Fairclough, Neil Henderson and Lynn Loo, as well as work by Sherwin and myself. Lucy Reynolds has curated a repertoire of short, specially commissioned films by women artists that changes every two weeks. More details here: http://www.camdenartscentre.org/whats-on/view/exh-25
The show stresses various continuities between the different media represented. In my own case, the 16mm film Correspondences is shown alongside the four-part painting by Angela Allen, from which it is closely derived. This joint work was premiered at the Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario and the film was shown at Media City Festival, in the same city, in May 2012.
Two installation views of Correspondences.
General view of gallery three showing, from left to right, work by Emma Hart, Simon Payne, Guy Sherwin and my own Risoni, a double loop that runs in one projector. In the same room, but not visible, is a plexiglass sculpture by Denise Hawrysio and a large painting by Dan Hays.
Two more installation views, courtesy of Andy Keate / Camden Arts Centre:
Newsprint (1972/2012) by Guy Sherwin, showing the projection onto a table and, to the right, the original film material from which the film was made. The optical soundtrack is generated by the image, which is achieved by printing the newsprint onto the soundtrack area on the edge of the film.
It is all too rare for Expanded Cinema, which is invariably shown in alternative spaces outside both the art gallery and cinema worlds, to be shown in an art gallery. The show is wonderfully curated and strategically installed, so that the interplay between different works really comes alive. It is a timely review, given the new wave of expanded film projections by artists like Bruce McClure, Metamkine, Gibson and Recoder and others. The occasion also re-stimulates the debate about how best to show time based works in galleries with ambulatory spectators. Most are short, and activated by the spectator pushing a button on a wall, the effect of which seems to be to create a kind of contract between the spectator and the work, such that it will be viewed in its entirety. None of the films is shown in a black box cinema, and the mixed pieces in room three, most of which are highly coloured, freely interact, generating a pulsating coloured space within which individual works function as generative focal points.
Nicky Hamlyn 