Michael Curran and Imogen Stidworthy's 'Closing/Close By' is a meditation on the power of cinema and storytelling whose spare, almost minimal, imagery reflects on narrative form and its inscription into memory. The piece consists of a number of interlocking elements. In one of two adjoining spaces, two video monitors are fixed side by side along the back wall.
From the darkness of the screens, matchlight illuminates the faces of two figures as they read aloud from a collection of film synopses, their words edited by the time that it takes for each match to flare and die. The staggered momentum evokes an act of call-and-response, as the two shift uncertainly between competition and collaboration. While their motives and determinations remain ambiguous, narrative is suspended in the very attempt to devise it.
Within the synopses, derived from classic screenplays, all specific details such as locations are replaced by generic terms, while individual characters become flattened into the pronouns 'he' and 'she'. Recurring motifs and repetitions are magnified, bestowing a mythic dimension to the often mundane source material.
The videos are accompanied by pinboards on which a collection of diagrams imply a process of enquiry into the forms of action, event and location; a store-house of notations for visualizing narrative possibilities, bereft of fixed coordinates.
In an adjacent space a projected film loop shows Maryon Park, the key location of Antonioni's 'Blow Up', aptly described by lain Sinclair as a seductive secret theatre. The voices of the narrators, bleeding through from the other space, attempt to inscribe their fractured dramas into the image; the park, deserted and silent but for the sound of wind in the trees, evoking a sense of past events as well as of anticipation.
Presented at Open Eye New Media & Photography Gallery.
Commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella, London.
Financially supported by the Arts Council of England and The Netherlands Foundation for Fine Art, Design & Architecture.
New Commission.
[LESS]Michael Curran and Imogen Stidworthy's 'Closing/Close By' is a meditation on the power of cinema and storytelling whose spare, almost minimal, imagery reflects on narrative form and its inscription into memory. The piece consists of a number of interlocking elements. In one of two adjoining spaces, two video monitors are fixed side by side along the back wall.
From the darkness of the screens, matchlight illuminates the faces of two figures as they read aloud from a collection of film synopses, their words edited by the time that it takes for each match to flare and die. The staggered momentum evokes an act of call-and-response, as the two shift uncertainly between competition and collaboration. While their motives and determinations remain ambiguous, narrative is suspended in the very attempt to devise it.
Within the synopses, derived from classic screenplays, all specific details such as locations are replaced by generic terms, while individual characters become flattened into the pronouns 'he' and 'she'. Recurring motifs and repetitions are magnified, bestowing a mythic dimension to the often mundane source material.
The videos are accompanied by pinboards on which a collection of diagrams imply a process of enquiry into the forms of action, event and location; a store-house of notations for visualizing narrative possibilities, bereft of fixed coordinates.
In an adjacent space a projected film loop shows Maryon Park, the key location of Antonioni's 'Blow Up', aptly described by lain Sinclair as a seductive secret theatre. The voices of the narrators, bleeding through from the other space, attempt to inscribe their fractured dramas into the image; the park, deserted and silent but for the sound of wind in the trees, evoking a sense of past events as well as of anticipation.
Presented at Open Eye New Media & Photography Gallery.
Commissioned by Film & Video Umbrella, London.
Financially supported by the Arts Council of England and The Netherlands Foundation for Fine Art, Design & Architecture.
New Commission.
