HEREUNDER: Upcoming Video / Performance

Vicky Langan and I will be presenting our new work, Hereunder, in Limerick this Saturday in the 'Just Listening' showcase, part of the Just Listen sound art festival.

Except that we sincerely hope our audience won't be 'just listening' as Hereunder is a video work that will give viewers a great deal to look at as well as hear. An intense, fragmented (auto)biographical portrait of Vicky, it sets her adrift amidst lockers of garden shed bric-a-brac from which she summons an ocean of sounds...

For this screening, Vicky will accompany the projection with a special live performance...


Just Listening
Showcase of Irish-Based Sound Artists
Limerick School of Art & Design
Church Gallery Space
10.30-4.30 April 30th

Arts Council Bursary Award

Many thanks to the Irish Arts Council, who've awarded me a substantial bursary to allow me the means to develop my ambition to work with film-on-film.

Watch this space for news of those projects as they develop over the next year...

BACKGROUND

Background, a new 20-minute video, is now completed. A slow, brooding, atmospheric work, it expands on the measured fragmentation of Ten Minutes Isn't Worth a Dream, while sharply juxtaposing HDV, degraded Super-8, and sometimes protracted 'interruptions' of black screen. Shot for the most part in the wintry beauty of rural northern Spain, it uses images of ruined buildings, discarded objects, and old-looking film footage to form perhaps the starkest articulation yet of my idea of a moving image work as a broken thing, a ruined space. Esperanza Collado and Vicky Langan are the humans occasionally spotted adrift in this construct, exploring and filming as they go...

BLACK SUN Rose

Another edition of the Black Sun experimental music and film event is coming up this easter weekend! The live acts, curated as always by Vicky Langan, feature Daniel Higgs, with Raising Holy Sparks, Rory Francis O'Brien and Sacred Harp Singers of Cork also on the programme.

The film section, programmed by me, consists of two early films by Peter Rose. Please see the programme notes below....

Black Sun
Saturday April 23rd, Doors 7pm, €8
Camden Palace Hotel, Camden Quay, Cork

This April’s Black Sun film screening is devoted to two hypnotic films by American artist Peter Rose. Active in film, video, installation and performance since 1968, Rose’s work interrogates the nature of time, space, light and perception, often drawing influence from his background in mathematics. Although subsequently known for his work involving language used as written text on screen, the two early works in this programme are both strikingly hallucinatory explorations of space.

Analogies: studies in the movement of time (14 mins, 1977) has been described by Rose as ‘an intriguing series of visual riddles’. Simple camera movements taking place around a plain, institutional looking building are rearranged as multiple screens according to structuralist principles, allowing several perspectives on the same action, often with slight time delays between them. This opens space, movement and gesture to dizzying new permutations. For example, in the words of Noel Carroll, "when Rose fills the screen with twenty-five images, the experience is akin to music. An image ripples across the screen as a theme echoes across the instruments of an orchestra, giving way to complicated designs, each image an arabesque in a Persian rug."

Incantation (13 mins, 1970) is an ecstatic montage of images of nature- trees, plants, the sun, the moon, water- rapidly layered and intercut in a way that suggests a powerful dynamic force behind natural rhythms. Its irresistible energy is enhanced by the use of a compelling, breath-based Islamic chant on the soundtrack, which brings a prayer-like energy to the film. Astoundingly, this exceptionally visually dense, yet precise, work was created entirely in camera on Super-8 film, with no post-production work performed on the image at all. In our day of instantly accessible digital manipulation, such a technical feat appears all the more marvelous- and its results all the more gorgeous.

Special thanks to Pip Chodorov, without whose help this screening would not be possible.

Notes on MONGOLIAN BARBECUE

Esperanza Collado has written the following programme notes for one of my most widely screened videos, The Mongolian Barbecue (2009). In spite of its brevity, it encapsulates the work perfectly.

Described by the artist as 'the internalization of vision… and its outcome', The Mongolian Barbecue presents us with the edge of an abyss circumscribed by cinematic possession. The corporeal ritual involved in such a transcendental rapture falls at its ultimate climax into the rhythmical interstices of red frames that subsequently opens the way to a collection of static images from vampire B-movies, the feminine paradise a cinephile could encounter after taking a glimpse at cinema's interior cavities. Insolent in its subversive depiction of bodily intervention, disquieting and perfectly balanced, The Mongolian Barbecue shares with much of Le Cain's work the presence of TV static and the use of sounds that directly refer to medium specificity.

Expanded OPERATION

Operation Rewrite, the internet video project Esperanza Collado and I have been working on since January, is about to burst its online boundaries. Thanks to a generous production grant from MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Leon), we are to expand this constantly self-defining phenomenon into a website, a book, an installation, an expanded cinema work... It's growing...

In the meantime, be sure to have a look at our most recent videos, -4 and -3, posted over the last couple of days.