Don't Fight It!
27th June 2003 - 3rd August 2003
Don’t Fight It! brings together new
video works from six artists, whose respective practices include a
diverse range of imagery and forms, to explore particular representations
of subjectivity, the occasional notion of desire and the potentially
immersive nature of video.
By working through particular vernaculars of the entertainment industry;
such as pop video, celebrity docu-soap, advertising, and the conventions
of art-house cinema; the works in this exhibition explore spaces of
interface, inclusion and 'willed surrendering' to their own fictions.
The works will be presented in a specially constructed environment
within Gasworks Gallery that will link the works by housing them in
separate areas.
Amanda Beech
Amanda Beech’s video works take the form of MTV style ‘pop-promo’
videos, blending re-filmed, edited fragments of blockbuster movies
with contemporary music. Through choreographing generic, populist
and highly individuated themes of power and desire, Beech produces
art works that consider the way in which power is experienced through
and as images. For this exhibition Beech will show a work not shown
before in London, entitled Alien, 2002.
Renaud Bézy
Employing computer generated animation and digital music compositions
Renaud Bézy creates brightly coloured hard-edged vignettes
of utopian virtual landscapes. Whether constructing a catalogue of
slow-motion screaming characters, constantly shifting jungles or urban
scenes that auto-destruct and rebuild themselves, the luxury and pleasure
inherent in the absorption of these video-game style representations
draws us into a world where we are unable to determine whether this
is dream-like or nightmarish imagery. Bézy will show a new
work for Don’t Fight It! that appropriates, in short loops,
sequences of burning and violently exploding 1970s American cars,
set to ‘appropriately’ excitement–inducing music.
Francesca Gore
Francesca Gore’s video works involve multi-screen installations
that often combine video projections with monitors as well as separate
remote sounds and music. By simultaneously playing disconnected loops
of carefully staged performance footage, usually involving the artist
and animals, Gore generates hypnotic repeating awry narratives that
employ a range of aesthetics from fairy tales to ‘home video’.
The potential for poetic readings of these fragments are deliberately
short-circuited by a heavily laden self-conscious style. Ole
Hagen
By utilising blunt cinematic and ‘televisual’ devices
such as the internal monologue and documentary-style voice over Ole
Hagen creates video works that frankly address the conceit of inscribing
a stabilised subject through representations. Hagen appropriates different
genres of film making from documentary to folkloric animation to explore
the imagined junction between internal and external worlds.
Hagen will present a new work featuring a new melancholic and tragically
humourous character.
Francis Lamb
Francis Lamb’s time-based work focuses on the way that we come
to know cinema and its histories through video; a format that is full
of deletions and distortions of scale. It uses this poverty of experience
as a critical tool to comment on the circumstances around the creation
and reception of particular histories of film. By re-editing specific
scenes, removing dialogue and incidental music, Lamb’s work
suggests that cinematic sense is constructed through the accumulation
of detail rather than the sequence of narrative. Lamb will also show
a new work for this exhibition.
David Mollin
David Mollin’s video work is reminiscent of the hermetic and
restlessly compulsive world conjured up in the spaces of John Macnoughton’s
film ‘Henry’; a claustrophobic domesticated space created
by the protagonist but also acting as the reason for his leaving.
The video Mollin presents for this exhibition is based on a trip to
Switzerland in 2001. During that visit he had a combination of experiences
that led to a sense of a Charles Bronson-esque, 70's Alpine mid-life
crisis, back-packed and occurring almost entirely under cover. It
was through this kind of physically exhausting snow-blizzard haze
that he experienced the work of a native to the area of St Galleon,
and which he has tried to record in the form of an early-eighties
video, 'Tainted Love'.
Don’t Fight It!
is in conjunction with a season of French photography and video,
‘Made in Paris: Photo/Video', taking place in London
in May/June 2003.
It is co-ordinated by the French Embassy - Institut Français
du Royaume-Uni.
For more information see www.institut-francais.org.uk/madeinparis
