"Mark Lewis: Large-Scale Film Installations"
2001-03-11 until 2001-04-22
Museum of Modern Art, Oxford
Oxford, , UK

This exhibition will present a series of works by the Canadian-born artist Mark Lewis and will include the British premiere of his new work North Circular (2000). It will provide the first opportunity to see in Britain, a body of this challenging and innovative artists work.

Mark Lewis's work functions as a critique of cinema, encouraging the viewer's awareness of the clichés, conventions and fragmentary nature of film, and how it has been constructed historically. In so doing, he also acknowledges its suggestive power, and the alluring, seductive visual qualities of the medium, whilst maintaining a certain critical distance in his extraction and re-evaluation of its components.

Like commercial feature films, Lewis's films are shot on 35mm with a professional crew, actors and extras, extensive lighting, cranes, sets and special effects, before being post-produced using high-quality transfer and editing suites. They are then transferred to laser disk or DVD for large-screen looped projection in the gallery space. His work, which he has described as 'part cinema', explores the formal inventions of mainstream and avant-garde cinema, whilst isolating particular elements. He draws our attention to the movement of the camera, tracking the passage of time and permeating the space around its subject (Smithfield, 2000), and the absorbing voyeurism of the 'camera-eye' (Peeping Tom, 2000).

Now based in London, Lewis has worked in film for the past five years. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions, most recently Cinema! Cinema!, The Cinematic Experience, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1999); Wouldn't it be Nice, Gallerie Montevideo, Amsterdam (2000); Third Taipei International Bienale of Contemporary Art, Taipei, Taiwan (2000), and Intelligence: New British Art 2000, Tate Britain. His solo exhibitions include Tramway, Glasgow (1996); Site Gallery, Sheffield (2000); Norwich Gallery, Norwich (2000); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Geneva (2000) and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa (2000).

The exhibition will be the first survey of his work in Britain and is organised in association with Film and Video Umbrella.

IMAGE:
Mark Lewis
Still from Smithfield, 2000

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