Dr Damian Peter Sutton
Lecturer
Department of Historical and Critical Studies
Glasgow School of Art
167 Renfrew Street
Glasgow
G3 6RQ
 
Tel: 0141 353 4560
Fax: 0141 353 4557
 
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-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Cook LUX [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: 19 November 2004 09:25
Subject: LUX SALON: FILMART/ Thursday 25 November 7pm


you are invited to

THURSDAY 25 NOVEMBER, 7pm for 7.30pm 	
LUX SALON: FILMART
Work that moves questioningly between gallery and cinematic projection space. Films that introduce the missing link between experimental film tradition and current art practise, and, conversant with both fine art and fine art film, create a bridge that defines as developmental the difference between the privacy of the gallery and the public nature of screening. This screening accompanies a group exhibition of the same name which took place at Catalyst Arts, Belfast in October 2004. Curated by Ruth Novaczek.

Programme includes:

'Dark Dark' Abigail Child
'Fatima's Letter' Alia Syed
'Plot 2004' Julia Dogra-Brazell
'sense' Ruth Novaczek

LUX SALON takes place at LUX, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EZ. See directions at http://www.lux.org.uk/directions.html

Admission to the LUX SALON is FREE but places are limited so booking is essential. To book a place email [log in to unmask]

'Artists film and video uniquely positions itself between the cinematic space (quite literally meant, the space of cinematic projection) and the gallery, the traditional space of visual art . Each environment requires different notions of scale, of narrative, of focus and attention. Any screening assembles a group in a particular space and time, nurturing a collective, plural 'dreaming'. The gallery by contrast, encourages an individual relation, working not with a collective consciousness, but with solitary even personal narrative. Attending a screening of short works promotes an expectation that what one sees, one sees once, contextualised within a themed programme. The attention and its span, demanded by the collective, cinematic space, requires a commitment to the duration of the programme. The gallery allows fleeting glimpses or long reflection, allows viewing and reviewing, allows the possibility of contextual/narrative disfunction, dipping into or completely avoiding a particular work in favour of another. 

This programme and its accompanying exhibition explores contemporary film art which can cross the line and back again. Work that moves questioningly between gallery and cinematic projection space. The films introduce the missing link of experimental film tradition to current art practise, and, conversant with both fine art and fine art film, create a bridge that defines as developmental the difference between the privacy of the gallery and the public nature of screening.'


The Artists

Abigail Child an NYC based film maker/artist of over 30 years has worked with found footage, surrealistic narrative, and postmodern invention. Her work brilliantly and wryly ironises postwar america. Her montage and cutting an hommage to the great themes of cinema, a transgressive conversation with its conventions.
"Dark Dark' takes moments, out-takes and glimpses, and cuts them into a path through its world. Painful and ironic, it overlays a swathe of ambivalence across a map of montage.

'the films don't form a single line...but rather a map of a series of corners in relation to mind, to how one processes material...'

Abigail Child on, 'this is what you were born for' a series,comprising seven films made over several years.

Alia Syed, a london based, artist has maintained a unique and particular place in the british film avant garde. 'fatima's letter' is a poem in urdu, a palimpsest laid onto the transformed bones of a city, overlaid with half told and colliding stories, engraving text into an urban backdrop. the narrative resonates with the sedative of its lilting tone, nudged by sudden fissures. Syed welds the broken to the flowing in sinuous gestures that celebrate screen and light. 

Julia Dogra-Brazell
 A London based artist, producing sound, photographic and film fragments primarily in a gallery context. In 'Plot 2004' - one in a series of films reconstituted around the same unnamed 'event' -  Dogra-Brazell cuts minutely into moments, compresses cinema, puts it into the gallery, invests its minute gestures with super intensity, forces the repetition of the cycle.
Here, as the  artist moves from gallery to cinema, the hommage is reversed, and turned on itself. The glimpse is not reiterated but remains a glimpse, almost subliminal. The narrative challenges our attention span. We question our perception; it is a micro moment, a comet.
A solo photographic exhibition of her work appeared at the Scene Gallery in NY in  Feb 2003. In May of the same year, she was awarded a Jerwood Commission in conjuction with the Wapping Project. A feature on her film work will appear in Next Level in 2005. 

Ruth Novaczek has been working with film and video for 25 years, moving between experimental personal narrative and looped multi screen installation. Her recent videos are short episodes that use heavily processed and eclectic imagery with sampled multilayered sound in a kind of collage of location and dislocation. 

'sense' is a condensed transatlantic story, a restless tragedy of sampled aphorisms and fleeting landscape.. part of an ongoing series of short films that transpose to site specific installation pieces.

Novaczek showed 'Red Sea Heatless Night' a 3 screen video installation at the New York Kunsthalle in 2000, and was Dartington Arts Artist in Residence from 2000-2001. Her work was shown in a recent survey of experimental film 'Experiments in Moving Image' in London 2003.