Out (mirror image) and (painting as prop) with (house plant)
“I ended up having a late lunch with Geoff in his office, smelly cheese and crackers handed to me one by one. I said to him, it is foremost about documentation – I am not a film maker, I am a someone who messes with props and builds installations. Therefore I am not making a film directly, instead I am investigating the concept of a film by building frames one by one, by way of stop frame animation.”
Day out with out with simulacra is a film project using ornaments of everyday and objects of a gallery context to explore the cross-division of front room play and exhibition performance and display.
I have been using ‘out with’ a lot in my writing recently, it means something different to outside of, it also conjures a play on words that is, if anything, satisfying: “A day out with simulacra”, could mean a day out on the beach say with mirrors and plants and friends and your camera, or it could mean a day without simulacra, thereby being a day without any representative image of anything else: a day that is outside of normative exploration.
The ‘act’ then, in the end, was immersive and experimental – a whole day was spent (with dried fruit and ginger beer for sustenance) making imagery with the objects I brought with me and in the end making movement image. These films were then built on and finally rendered in to twenty different versions: each version untitled was then posted to a different audience member who consents, if they will, to take the DVD with the film on it home with them.
Thus the film never touches the gallery as an actual film, it exists erstwhile as another object hidden within the politics of space that is a gallery-cum-assembly or resource.
Images here are:
A ‘painting’ on the wall of a ‘gallery’
A day out on the beach in East Lothian
A film still, or photograph that in the end made the film, “Day out with simulacra”
A plastic plant found outside the gallery in the corridor
