- Venue
- Bloomsberg Space
- Location
- London
Places of Laughter and Crying is an exhibition comprising of several video and film works. The different pieces of work correspond to each the other in terms of theme. A sense of the psychological impact of place and how we experience it is strong throughout. However the way the separate pieces of work are set up within the space are very different. The exhibition moves comfortably through different forms of video installation; large cinematic screening spaces, film projection, and images shown on a collection of flat screens. I am interested in how these pieces function together as a show and how they each immerse and effect the viewer in different ways. Using the two main works in the show I want to discuss further the impact of video installation, and of video in terms of the cinematic. But also video in a non narrative sense, exploring how the viewer can be drawn into durational work.
Through thick black curtains we enter into the main room of the Bloomsberg Space. The room is very large and dark and straight head we are invited to sit and watch Beddington’s Shanghai Moon. This is a colour video installation consisting of a long multi screen using four projectors, and speakers are placed around the room. The piece depicts the city of Shanghai during the full moon season. Beddington records moments of footage from different locations which is edited together to give a feeling of experiencing vignettes of time in an unfamiliar city. The video functions as both multi screen and sequence. The installation is orchestrated in how the images are put together and sequenced, likewise the sound is taken from live recording but put back into the videos. Sometimes we watch only one of the screens which is highlighted by the blackness of the others, other times all four screens are in operation and we receive the feeling of multiple views of the same space.
I consider the way this work is staged with regards to the cinema space, whereby entering the darkened room represents ideas of stepping into another world. Leaving the room I found a little disorientating. Alike leaving any gallery space when we enter back into the real world, however this is more so with the cinema space. From the seductive world of Shanghai Moon back onto the busy streets of London on a greyish day, the viewer is dislocated, disorientated, with little real travelling involved.
These are moments of real time we are given, fragments of a lost city. And I wonder how much of a sense of time and place we receive? Are we drawn into it? Are we more so because of the staging of the piece?
Conversely through the other side of the black curtains we step into a very different space. In a lit space thirty screens of various sizes hang across three walls of the balcony. The images are moments, places, durations. Therefore the videos function similarly yet they operate on a much larger form multi screen, and are not orchestrated as such. I think this is quite important, as I don’t think they would work on one screen. Each video is a snapshot of a different place Beddington has experienced over a four year period, unlike Shanghai Moon they do not have a collective place to bring them together. Side by side they stand both against each other and in harmony. Each place is different. From the bridge across the balcony all of the screens can be seen at once, they are like photographs on light boxes until you get closer and capture their movement.
I’m interested in the way the viewer moves through the space. Each video is a duration, some last only forty seconds, others up to 1 hour. I want to consider how important it is that the work is durational video and not just photography, and how it changes the way the work is viewed, the potential impact it might have on the viewer. Perhaps with video you might feel like you are more part of a place. Photography is like a snapshot like a memory, or perhaps a lack of memory. A single surviving moment of time, an image may cause you to forget the feeling of actually being in that place. Video captures a space of time, prolonged. Its slight movement , the feeling of real time as if the scene could be taking place as you watch. Shanghai moon also depicts durations, however they are sequenced together; the colour red resonates, a restaurant red lights and table cloths and chairs. We watch through windows, like voyeurs. Screens appear and disappear.
My favourite is to watch the most still of the images, and to spot the movement, to fixate on the space. The changing weather elements, movements of wind, crashing waves, collecting rain droplets, changes of light. There is something hypnotising about some of these pieces. We are watching, and waiting for something to happen, or speculating what might have taken place. There is an anxiety in this waiting.
Blackness. And then a lit circular lamp, insects crawl around the buzz of light. A city across water, a tranquil landscape of blue. Raindrops falling on a street, light and shadow gradual change. Each of Beddington’s compositions are quite beautiful, snapshot fragments of a time and a place. I feel their strange melancholy, or peacefulness, or a composition makes me smile. Can art move you to a different time and place through the medium of video? Familiarity and unfamiliarity I settle somewhere in between, I feel the strangeness of a foreign place in most of these locations, yet a certain light can trace fragments of memory. And I like the way in which this can do so.
In both of Beddington’s pieces elements of the cinematic are present. In Places Of Laughter and Of Crying it is in the duration which I find cinematic; there is tension through gradual change and repetition which heightens the viewers sense of time and place. In Shanghai Moon it is within the staging of the work that we are completely drawn into this place. The orchestration of image and the feeling of non-linear time is filmic. The sound layers envelop the viewer intensifying the psychological impact which is conveyed in the images. I am interested in the conclusion that without narrative the viewer can in fact become drawn into the work, perhaps more so than with the distraction of character. The viewer is the character within the space.
