The Green On Red Gallery hosts its third curated group
exhibition entitled Video Time. Curated by Jerome O Drisceoil, this
exhibition opens the new year with five invited artists from the U.
S. A. and Europe: Darren Almond, Ceal Floyer, Igor and Svetlana
Kopystiansky, and Richard Serra. Inspired by a
number of pioneering video works by Serra, this exhibition brings
together a collection of video/ filmworks whose use of the medium
concentrates and extends the viewers' experience of the passing of
time. In each work, in different ways, the spectator is asked to
re-situate themselves in a phenomenological dialogue about time and
place. The four works selected are entitled Time and Time Again, H2O
Diptych, 16x (" times 16 ") and Railroad Tunbridge,
respectively.
Richard Serra's Railroad Turnbridge (1976, 16mm black & white
film transferred to video; duration: 17 mins) does with film what
his infamous cor-ten steel sculptures do to the third dimension The
parallax that the viewer experiences as he or she moves through a
Serra sculpture is echoed in this video work. The sense of
disorientation generated by the turning bridge and the fixed camera
- or is it the other way round - holds the viewer in an uneasy
suspense.
Hand Catching Lead (1968, 16mm black & white film transferred
to video; duration 3 mins 30 sec) is a seminal and early film in
which the artist films a grimy outstretched male hand repetitively
catching a bar of lead. This film is part of a series of four in
which Serra documented his interaction with the materials of his
sculptures - in the act of scraping, being physically restrained,
holding a roll of lead. One is drawn into an anticipatory state of
expectation, experiencing the weight of lead falling into one's hand
and anticipating catching it or possibly dropping it.
In 16x (1979) by Igor and Svetlana Kopystiansky the camera's gaze
is fixed directly upward. This is the reverse of the classic
Rodchenko aerial photographs of the 1920's. Here the Kopystianskys'
camera follows the route of the overhead Moscow tramlines on their
way to some unknown destination. The result of this film, based on a
mundane event, is a delicately moving drawing. It is difficult not
to be reminded of early 20th century Suprematism. This work is
accompanied by four photographs which the Kopystiankys took in the
Moscow underground. These blurred photographs have a very
contemporary casualness about them that less suggests utopia than a
sense of numb activity.
Ceal Floyer has described the H2O Diptych as an attempt to create
an experience of suspended self-awareness, of being on the fulcrum
between anticipation and hindsight, in a dead zone. This diptych
shows on the one monitor a glass of sparkling water losing its
effervescence; on the other monitor a pan of water slowly comes to
the boil. The action in the video is slow and boring. Hers is a
witty and poetic insinuation of a condition of being cancelled out.
The point of it will probably lodge itself in your brain and click
into recognition on the bus on the way home.
Darren Almond's piece, Time and Time Again is the only projection
work in this exhibition. It perfectly exemplifies Almond's
preoccupation with an intensified experience of time. This work,
which features a clock loudly 'announcing' the passing of seconds
into minutes and hours, presents time as a mechanical structure, as
a temporal condition, as a cosmic event and presents the viewer with
a theoretical predicament or state of self-reflexive debate -what is
one's relationship to time and place and to the world at
large?
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