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 Œpop-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 Œappropriately‚ 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 Œhome 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 Œtelevisual‚ 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 humorous 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 ŒHenry‚; 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
With additional support from The Royal Norwegian Embassy in London and HALO PRESENTATIONS
IMAGE:
Amanda Beech
ALIEN, 2003
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