Master's Programme
Still 8: 'Domain Formlessness' 2006
This short film comprises a ‘model space’ – the artist’s studio/a stage set/picture frame – and simulates old and crackled looking sepia film. The ‘action’ of someone repeatedly piling up model junk in a ‘doll’s house scale’ model studio is the film’s repeated motif. The scaled down material (model furniture, stud-walls and other junk/props from the studio) is thrown through a scaled down doorway ‘stage right’; the material piles up and when the pile begins to engulf the room, a curtain swishes in from either side to draw a close to the ‘vignette’ - only to reopen seconds later to an empty room/stage. This process repeats itself as several ‘acts’ and is accompanied by a ‘Djangoesque’ jazz guitar soundtrack.
The film references a faint index, for example, the process of picture making and ‘pictured space’ (in painting and in film); the ‘frame’; catastrophe; and seemingly futile endeavour and deadpan absurdity of early motion pictures.
There is a sense of a practice which is failing to keep a hold on itself; uncannily caught in the moment of an on going slip-up or blunder. Is the film an incomplete project? Is it ‘depicting’ something that fails to fulfil its potential; a visual articulation of something abandoned – perhaps a ‘work in progress’ or perhaps a venture or development left in a state of ‘ruin’ - or is it the base material for the ruination of the way the space, depiction, and all it may or may not signify, is viewed or ‘consumed’?
Still 8: 'Domain Formlessness' 2006
This short film comprises a ‘model space’ – the artist’s studio/a stage set/picture frame – and simulates old and crackled looking sepia film. The ‘action’ of someone repeatedly piling up model junk in a ‘doll’s house scale’ model studio is the film’s repeated motif. The scaled down material (model furniture, stud-walls and other junk/props from the studio) is thrown through a scaled down doorway ‘stage right’; the material piles up and when the pile begins to engulf the room, a curtain swishes in from either side to draw a close to the ‘vignette’ - only to reopen seconds later to an empty room/stage. This process repeats itself as several ‘acts’ and is accompanied by a ‘Djangoesque’ jazz guitar soundtrack.
The film references a faint index, for example, the process of picture making and ‘pictured space’ (in painting and in film); the ‘frame’; catastrophe; and seemingly futile endeavour and deadpan absurdity of early motion pictures.
There is a sense of a practice which is failing to keep a hold on itself; uncannily caught in the moment of an on going slip-up or blunder. Is the film an incomplete project? Is it ‘depicting’ something that fails to fulfil its potential; a visual articulation of something abandoned – perhaps a ‘work in progress’ or perhaps a venture or development left in a state of ‘ruin’ - or is it the base material for the ruination of the way the space, depiction, and all it may or may not signify, is viewed or ‘consumed’?