Dead Bodies and Cardboard was an art exhibition which ran from 9th – 23rd February 2008 at Elevator Gallery, London. I exhibited a new video titled Porn Shoot Off-Cuts in this show.
The video is made from footage shot by cameramen at porn-shoots, using the sequences that would usually be cut out during editing. This gives a fragmentary impression of the events taking place, directing our attention to the surrounding environment, and the mood of the participants.
Things that go Bump in the Night was an exhibition curated by Dominic Mason at the Victorian Gothic, at 20-21 Visual Arts Centre in Scunthorpe. The exhibition ran from 15 Sept – 1 Dec 2007, and featured work by Nigel Grimmer, Marcelle Hanselaar, Pam Glew, Craig Fisher, Luci Gorell Barnes, Cat James, Suzanne Langston-Jones, Johnny White, and myself.
By far the most popular topos of the nineteenth-century uncanny was the haunted house. A pervasive leitmotiv of literary fantasy and architectural revival alike, its depiction in fairy tales, horror stories, and Gothic novels gave rise to a unique genre of writing that, by the end of the century, stood for romanticism itself. The house provided an especially favored site for uncanny disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by contrast the terror of invasion by alien spirits. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" was paradigmatic: "With the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. … The feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible."
Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (1992)
This blog accompanies the touring art exhibition The Unheimlich, curated by Matt Roberts.
I'm Matt Lippiatt, and I'm one of the artists whose work will appear in the exhibition. I plan to use this blog to collect research material including texts, images and videos, and to explore ideas relating to the unheimlich, or uncanny.
