Stanley Picker Gallery

Rachel Davies makes films that inhabit a space between dreams and autobiography. Often depicting choreographed figures in the urban environment, her works combine filmic composition with live performance and narrative. Blending style and genre and re-processing existing footage, they are passionate and melancholic studies of memory and the present moment, place and displacement. Combining filmic composition with live performance and narrative, they are passionate and melancholic studies of memory and the present moment, place and displacement. A Time & A Place comprised four pieces from the previous ten years – including Hong Kong to Hull, We Got Old and Gold – together with a new video/live piece entitled A Time & A Place and a book-edition Ten Wasted Years.

A Time & A Place was Davies’ first gallery exhibition of works comprising films from the previous ten years, together with a new site-specific piece and a book edition. Presenting the films together within one space focused her personal themes of navigation, narrative and retrospect, the relationship between the individual and the sub/urban landscape, the real and the performed, and her growing interest in how the spectator may come to inhabit the space of representation. Marking moments in time, there were echoes and threads between films; some visible, some lost. The whole 50-minute sequence mapped the development of Davies’s ten-year relationship with the art form.

HONG KONG TO HULL (16min 1992-1999) reworks documentary footage from the artist’s overland journey in 1991. Fleeting connections with strangers, immersion in the moment, episodes of solitary reflection; the camera is witness and marker of passing time. Seven years later the random footage is reprocessed into an ordered split-screen pattern that takes us on a circular journey. Edited by Nick Fenton.

SO WE WENT DANCING. (3min 1995-2000) reworks holiday footage combining it with the voice of a 92-year old woman looking back at an unexpectedly romantic time in her life.

GOLD (10min 2004) interprets the adrenaline-fuelled world of the teenage girl, full of promise, magic and attitude, through the skills and competition of two young girls in their local gym. Produced by Polly Nash / Featuring Amy Tarrant and Jessica Brough / Choreographed by H2Dance / Shot by Natasha Braier / Music by Tom Gilleron / Edited by Nick Fenton / Produced by Polly Nash / Funded by Arts Council England.

WE GOT OLD (10min 2002), a collaboration with choreographer Annie Lok, imagines a series of tableau that revisit a place from past memory. Shot in London and Hong Kong, the film alludes to senses of nostalgia and an acceptance of the passing of time. Shot by Natasha Braier / Music by Matt Davidson / Edited by Daniel Saul / Funded by The Place & Kingston University / Distributed by Lux Artist Film and Video.

A TIME AND A PLACE (9min 2004) charts the artist’s impressions of the walked journey from Kingston Station to Knights Park that she has taken regularly over the past nine years, and considers how performance features in the everyday and how people become part of a remembered landscape. Featuring performers from BA Live Arts and BA Fine Art, Faculty of Art, Design & Music.

TEN WASTED YEARS (2004) A limited-edition artist-book/dvd designed by Oliver Davies.

Biography:

Rachel Davies has been making film, video and animation for the last 14 years, using personal experience and travel as a starting point for her work. Often collaborating with other artists, her works are emotional, passionate and melancholic human studies that aim to challenge expectations of genre and touch new audiences.

Davies’ first film, made whilst at Nottingham Trent University, reached the London Film Festival in 1991. She then travelled to Hong Kong where she worked on commercials and directed award-winning animated promos for MTV Asia. Returning to Britain she studied at the Royal College of Art and began mixing drama with animation to make personal short experimental films that have subsequently been screened at film festivals worldwide. She has directed numerous short films for Channel 4 collaborating with poets, dancers, musicians and performance artists; an education series for BBC 2 and various projection pieces for dance and theatre collaborations.

In 2001 she was Associate Artist at The Place, London. She is a part-time Research Fellow within the Faculty of Art, Design & Music at Kingston University. Recent screenings include Chicago International Film Festival, The Edinburgh Film Festival and Portobello Film Festival where Gold won the Most Popular Overall Film Award. Future projects include developing large-scale films and installations combining performance, music and documentary subjects as well as making music video.

Andrew Carnie’s slide-dissolve installations tell stories that reflect upon our understanding of the workings of the human body. The sequential nature of the work in Slices & Snapshots is rooted in his fascination with the historically pioneering work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge and in contemporary chronophotography – the use of photographic sequencing in modern scientific analysis.

Andrew Carnie’s slide-dissolve installations tell stories that reflect upon our understanding of the workings of the human body. In the darkened gallery space layered images appeared and disappeared on suspended screens, the developing display absorbing the viewers into an expanded sense of space and time through the slowly unfolding narratives that evolved before them.

Slices & Snapshots is a collection of slide-dissolve works, the core elements of which are pairs of projectors set at opposite ends of a space, each casting sequences of images onto the layers of semi-translucent screens suspended between them. Narratives are created over time through images that surface onto the screens and then dissolve into slides projected from the other side.

The sequential nature of Carnie’s work is rooted in his joint fascination with the historically pioneering work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge and in contemporary chronophotography – the use of photographic sequencing in modern scientific analysis.

Contemporary science uses chronophotography to develop an understanding of the different biological functions of the body. Photographs, for example, are taken over time using fluorescent proteins, then combined into sequences, creating quick-time movies that act as tools for viewing the developing human form: the cells of the brain moving into their working position or muscle cells viewed ‘swimming’ to prescribed destinations. An understanding of the controls that influence these movements is reached by altering chemical concentrations and observing the diverse results.

‘Modern scientific imaging is affecting how we perceive ourselves and developing new notions of ‘self’ through techniques like MRI and CT scanning, X-rays and Ultrasound. Taking these scientific techniques as a source, I attempt to provide a wider resonance, my work existing in the mediating world of the mind – somewhere between raw scientific data and our condition as human beings’.
Andrew Carnie

2004 marks the centenary of the death of Eadweard Muybridge. Through his investigations into physical movement, Muybridge is considered one of the earliest scientific photographers as well as a pioneer of modern cinema. With this exhibition Carnie paid homage to the photographer, his life, his times and the compelling imagery he created.

Carnie’s work was the focus for the pilot edition of Paper, a graphic project that provides contemporary artists and designers with a flexible space for presenting work that expands beyond the walls of the gallery.

“Erasmus Schroeter’s background in the tightly controlled society of the former German Democratice Republic provides the context for two different collections of work in one exhibition. The core theme within these two bodies of work is the juxtaposition between the individual and the collective worldviews developed in the socialist GDR during the forty years of its existence between 1949 and 1989.

As an “alternative” artist in the GDR, Schroeter experienced everything that the Stasi, the notorious secret police, could throw at him. This gave him both an enduring mistrust of monolithic political ideologies and the freedom to take on taboo subjects such as Nazism and German militarism. The east German society in which Erasmus Schroeter’s career developed possessed a questioning creative spirit, borne of a personally experienced repression unlike anything in the west.

Obsolete almost as soon as they were contructed, the huge bunkers of the Atlantikwall were built to protect the coasts of the Nazi dominated Festung (fortress) Europa. As they have crumbled and decayed they have become monuments, not to ‘heroic’ struggle but to the folly of military conceit. Bathed in theatrical light, the luminous colours, imposing scale and crumbling ruins of Schroeter’s Bunkers create a panorama which is both utterly arresting and wholly repulsive. Violence and beauty shift in and out of focus as the German Romantic landscape of longing, immortalised by Caspar David Friedrich, is co-opted by Schroeter for purposes which are anything but.

Bild der Heimat is a series of elongated rectangular frames each of which contain a set of postcards mounted inside brightly coloured perspex. The supposedly collective, progressive and heroic image that East German socialism wanted to present to the world and to its people are featured in images of everything from shopping centres to industrial complexes and GDR holiday resorts. The self-aggrandising drabness of the postcards clashes violently with their consummately western presentation, implying a key to unlocking the enigma of the Bunker works themselves.

The architectural rationale which underpin both Bunker and Bild der Heimat are pervasive ideologies. Yet, although the architectural vestiges of Nazism and Stalinism maintain a clear presence in the cities, countryside and coastlines of contemporary Germany and beyond, they are often invisible to the untrained eye. Schroeter work makes it impossible for these ideologies to conceal themselves and therefore to remain Hiding in Plain Sight”.

Matthew Shaul 2004