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Indepth Arts News:
"Marty St James: Betweeness"
2001-01-12 until 2001-02-27
Colville Place Gallery
London, ,
UK United Kingdom
Betweeness: North American Indians refer to this as the ambiguity of where mountain top ends and sky begins. Indeed a sense of their belief is that all things are animate, alive in some way shape or form. Marty St.James believes that if art is to do with a sense of anything, in my mind it is to do with belief. The digital process allows me another point of observation and involvement with that sense of belief. A sense of belonging between two points in time, a beginning and an end - TIME, the fourth dimension !
A number of my previous performance and video art works were to do with a sense of staticness and in contrast my static image print works are often to do with movement. This allows me an artistic freedom within the form and content.
Marty St.James currently has video/digital works showing in two major exhibitions ŒPainting The Century 101‚ Portrait Masterpieces Boy/Girl a video diptych at The National Portrait Gallery in London (25th Oct - 4th Feb 2001) with Picasso, Freud, Bacon, Munch, Warhol etc and Picture Yourself an inter-active digital work at The Scottish National Portrait Gallery (1st Jan - 31st Dec 2000).
He has represented Britain in a number of exhibitions abroad, including Electronically Yours at the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo (1998) via the British Council. He has a number of works in public and private collections including The Swimmer an eleven monitor video installation at National Portrait Gallery, London.
Although the video is an obvious source for the portrait, as the home movie/home video/digital camera increasingly documents our families, Marty St James video-portraits subverted the media, iconography and conventions of the traditional portrait in almost shockiing manner... time simultaneously speeded up, slowed down, stopped, if one could imagine, a one-page flip-book. These works are at the same time intimate and remote, And, above (and below) all, there is an unnerving, uncanny silence.
-Stephen Bury, Head of Modern Collections, The British Library
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