UK
Today: A New View
Going Down
Julie Henry
June
11 – July 31, 2005
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Julie
Henry’s two-screen video work, Going Down, shows the avid
fans at a Crystal Palace football (i.e. soccer) match in London.
On two synchronized screens we see the result of cameras focused
respectively on the home team spectators, and the visitors’
spectators. Both groups are watching the same event, at the
same time, but their reactions are diametrically opposed. A
goal is scored, and for a looping minute and 32 seconds viewers
share the elation and despondency as the respective fans soar
into the sunshine of victory on one screen and the pit of despair
on the other. The goal that provokes the response we see happened
to be a goal for Coventry, so it is the home fans, knowing that
their team is heading down the rankings and toward relegation
from the Premiership, who are seen in a state of deep suffering.
Students of reception theory will recognize in Henry’s
piece a sports analogue to patterns of meaning in non-sport
arenas, such as reception-based art criticism and aesthetic
subjectivity. Julie Henry lives in London. Her exhibition in
Vancouver is courtesy of the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London.
Catalogue with texts by Steven Bode and Bill Jeffries.
Curated
by Bill Jeffries.
Opening
Reception: Saturday June 11 at 4pm
Special screening: Two nights only
Thursday
June 16 & 23, 7:30 to 8:30pm
Presentation of Julie Henry’s “X” (2000),
an eight-minute video showing X as he plays a video game in
London’s Trocadero. X (his games signature) is the greatest
video game player in all of London; crowds assemble wherever
he plays, their amazement registered with his every move. In
this piece he is playing “Star Wars Trilogy”, on
which he regularly completes the entire game without missing
a single target. Part way through X switches off his light sabre
during a duel with Darth Vader, provoking a gasp from the audience
of admirers. He re-ignites just at the right moment, performs
a 360 degree spin that completely blocks Vader’s attack,
and continues to play as if nothing has happened. Viewers of
this work participate in his mastery and control because Julie
Henry has aimed her camera not at the game, but at X’s
face, capturing the intensity and knowing confidence with which
he destroys not only the opposition, but also the creators of
video games, none of whom ever anticipated that an X would come
along.
“X” will be screened as a loop for one hour with
the floor open to discussion after the first eight-minute screening.
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Think
of England
Martin Parr
June
11– July 31, 2005
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Think of England is a selection of thirty photographs from
a body of work with the same title that Martin Parr made between
1995 and 2003. Parr is a member of Magnum, the global photo
agency based in New York, London and Paris. He lives in Bristol,
England and has photographed Britain with a singular relentlessness.
Parr’s framing, and his use of foregrounded fragments,
captures in spatial form what we cognitively know to exist
in the so-called real world. It is this image structure, as
much as the subjects of his photographs that have established
him in his position as the pre-eminent social documentarian
in Britain. Parr’s relation to England is ambiguous
and that ambiguity is expressed perfectly in his pictures.
His caring for the people he photographs seems to be combined
with his amazement at the state that things have come to.
Parr’s England is charming in an other-worldly way,
sometimes decaying before our eyes, product-obsessed, arcanely
ritualistic and, overall, a place where the seagulls look
healthier than the people. Demographically, Parr shows us
England’s defenders of Empire, its more recent arrivals,
and its youth, all at their leisure. As well, we see the detritus
that all of these groups leave behind in their search for
a better life. Think of England reveals the English at work
and play, as victims of mass consumerism and seemingly meaningless
tourism.
England is England but Martin Parr’s England is neither
Tracey Emin’s nor Bill Brandt’s England. Since
1983, when Parr started taking photographs in New Brighton,
a slightly past its best-before-date seaside resort outside
of Liverpool, his vision has become part of the global photographic
vocabulary. Some have said that Parr’s images are ‘brutally
real’, but one could also say that they really only
picture what is there, and that any brutality is not in the
pictures, but in the world that is his subject. Parr’s
particular photographic vision has redefined the shape of
the world for the rest of us. He may pick on his countryman
more often than those from elsewhere, but we know that his
world is our world as well.
Curated
by Bill Jeffries.
Opening
Reception: Saturday June 11 at 4pm
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"The
one I think I am..."
Nina Toft
June
11– July 31, 2005
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“The
one I think I am...” is a single screen presentation of
a confrontational twenty-minute video shot in Edinburgh’s
railway station. Nina Toft is an emerging Edinburgh artist who
is originally from Norway and in this work she plays the role
of a paparazzi, but her dogged pursuit is not of the rich and
famous, but rather people waiting for the trains that will take
them to work. Their dismay at being photographed in this version
of “15 minutes of fame” is a register of the camera’s
ability to be an invasive presence in contemporary society.
Conversely, her subject’s eventual acceptance of Toft’s
invasion of their privacy registers our collective acquiescence
to the pervasive presence of video cameras in the public domain,
especially in the U.K..
Toft’s subjects are existential actors in the daily Beckettonian
drama of getting out of bed and going to work. Their dilemma
is our dilemma and their surprise at being the star of Toft’s
art is not unlike our own when someone takes a moment to pay
attention to us. Toft’s camera is invasive, but “The
one I think I am...” is also an extremely gentle video
that, in its gentleness, is a critique of the aggressive behaviour
of both the paparazzi and documentarians alike. The surprising
thing about this work is that its quiet elegance, combined with
its apparent filling of a gap in the history of recent video
practice, leaves one feeling that we have either been there
or seen this before. Yet, so far as I know, no artist has previously
made a work that probes the condition of the individual in the
social world in just this way. However, similarities with the
photographic work of Ian Wallace and video work of Roy Arden
will not be lost on Vancouver viewers.
The structure of “The one I think I am...” is partially
determined by the behaviour of Toft’s subjects. The pursuit
of her lens is relentless while the subject is unaware of her
gaze, then, when they engage her lens, she gives them enough
video rope to express their pleasure or disdain, but when they
turn away one last time, she too turns to the next subject.
Not only do her subjects avert their gaze to avoid Toft’s
camera, but the artist as well, having approached her prey,
having seen what there was to see, then avoids them only in
order to repeat the experiment with another “one who thinks
they are”. Her approaches are met by a full range of psychological
responses, from avoidance, to frustration and rage – a
perfect mirror of the daily approaches and avoidances that provide
the basic rhythm of humanity’s shuffling through the world.
Catalogue.
Curated by Bill Jeffries.
Artist
talk with Nina Toft followed by Opening Reception: Saturday
June 11 at 4pm
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