Our Individual Projects
We have been commissioned by Sideshow, Nottingham’s fringe festival for the British Art Show for an exhibition at the Malt Cross Gallery Nottingham. For the commission each artist is will be using the space at the University as a laboratory for a week . The show will conclude with a closing event detailing the results of our experiments.
Here is a descripiton of our individual projects:
Pete McPartlan: Telecine
Telecine is the process by which film is duplicated onto video. Pete will recreate a telecine laboratory, creating a video out of found film. The lab is traditionally a controlled environment free of contaminants that aims to produce perfect facsimiles. The telecine process is a deliberately invisible component of film making. Pete will attempt to invert this – using an open and brightly lit room. The space will be cast as an extra in the new scanning of the film, the floor to ceiling windows becoming lightboxes. Allowing the architecture of the space to encroach on the original and breaking down the integrity of the original film. The work will be the product of the artist’s improvisations with a reel of film, small construction materials, cameras, motors and bits and pieces. Pete proposes a series of playful experiments to capture the film using ad-hoc processes, building temporary contraptions with dual purpose – installations devised to scan the film.
Controlling the means of post-production.
Ruth Scott: Line-Walk
Walking across a slack line that is attached and raised between two fixed points Ruth will attempt to gain control of her body through a durational act. By exploiting the states of balance and imbalance she shall often fall and almost always try to regain a sense of stability. She will use the pillars in the building to attach her slack line where public demonstrations shall take place . A film showing the difficulty of learning this will be presented alongside the slack line, which shall be played during non-performance times throughout the week. She will attach smaller cameras to her body that will trace and capture the involuntary movements depicting the struggle to stay on the line. The artists’ pre-occupation with keeping balance stems from a residency she did in France where she practised on a wire tight-rope. Line-Walk is a departure from this approach where the slack-line is placed higher off the ground and can be more challenging due to the rope moving as one walks across.
Georgie Park
Setting herself the challenge of mass-producing by hand, hundreds of replicas of wood-turned spindles such as chair legs and banister poles, Georgie will become a self taught wood-turner. By producing objects that traditionally connote domesticity she is striving to connect the body to the family home. Yet this endeavour is fundamentally flawed: it is distancing, to complete the task the artist must indulge in the the isolating act of obsessive production. Produced uniformly out of 50 cm lengths of 2×2 pine, left freshly turned and unvarnished the spindles will be piled in the space appearing as discarded detritus. Two or more small monitors placed amongst them will play subtle movements, reflective of breathing from disused spaces within the home.
