Hackney WickED

Chasing shadows in RED – Hackney WickED 2014 documentation

A massive THANK YOU! to Hackney WickED and Lab Film Projects for including my work in this year’s programme – Very Moving Pictures.

To see the film in full click here – it’s best viewed at about 2-3m high. To look at the original photographs take a look at my website.

Here are a couple of photographs of my film as it was shown in the Cinema Lounge.

This version  has a more constant pace than the rhythmic original (shown at Islington Exhibits 2013) and emphasises the built up layers that appear within the transitions.

Chasing Shadows (ivy / wire window transition) - Hackney WickED Cinema Lounge projection

Chasing Shadows (ivy / wire window transition) – at Hackney WickED / Lab Film Projects

One of my long term aims with this piece is to show it in places where it can interplay with it’s surroundings – such as passing car lights and street lights, real-world shadows, shapes etc. I’d not previously had a chance to test this idea, until now.  But thanks to the quirks of photography I was able to pick up some images that also absorbed the ambient light – with some amazing effects!  (I must stress that it didn’t look like this to the naked eye – more like the first picture above)

Chasing Shadows (house / steps transition) in red

Chasing Shadows (house / steps transition) in red – at Hackney WickED / Lab Film Projects

I’m now even more keen to project this series in every-day places, so will start the hunt now ready for a good evening location that I can use when the clocks go back!

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Chasing Shadows at Hackney WickED!

Chasing Shadows (multilayered silent film) will be showing at this year’s Hackney WickED festival, in the Lab Film Projects Cinema Lounge!

About Hackney WickED:

Hackney WickED is an annual arts festival taking place all around Hackney Wick, London from 1st August.

The festival is a dynamic force for promoting local culture – dedicated to providing a platform for artists to showcase their work alongside established and international names.

About the Lab Film Projects Cinema Lounge:

Screenings and performances of contemporary artist’s film and video, alongside live audio-visual performance and installation. Exciting, surprising, innovative and challenging, with appearances by directors and artists, the cinema is personal and engaging, and the place to see cutting-edge moving image works.

Times:

Chasing Shadows will be in the Experimental Film section of the main programme which also includes live performances halfway through.  The two programmes run from 12-7.30pm on Saturday 2nd August (experimental films towards the end) and 12-7.30pm on Sunday 3rd August (experimental films first).

Location:

Swan Wharf, 2nd Floor Cinema Lounge, 60 Dace Road, Hackney Wick, London, E3 2NQ

Chasing Shadows - steps

Chasing Shadows – steps

Chasing Shadows is a night journey, a peaceful sleepwalk through a silent world bereft of people.  As the evening light transforms the everyday into a dreamlike state, familiar urban landscapes disappear underneath resilient vegetation.

For this series I used long exposures on 35mm black and white film to record the contemplative stillness of the night, the only movement in the wind blowing through leaves. I hand printed the images with lith developer on old fibre based paper to create single edition prints with a tactile quality and degraded aesthetic reminiscent of illustrative drawing or etching.

Winning a 2013 Islington Exhibits Artists Award, I was commissioned to rework the images into a large-scale projection installation for solo exhibition, which I have since further refined using multiple exposure layering of the images. The projection paradoxically represents the frozen moments as transitory echoes of the original, each dissolving into the next in a slow, rhythmic loop.

Here is some documentation of the original projection installation:

Chasing Shadows - time based projection installation

Chasing Shadows – projection

Click here to see the film

Click here to see more of the series