Artists' Films: AK Dolven, Katy Dove, Luke Fowler, Boris Gerrets, Matthias Muller and Clunie Reid
This specially selected series of artists' films is screened in the Reading Room during the Thomas Scheibitz exhibition.
Featuring a different artist each week it includes work by AK Dolven, Katy Dove, Luke Fowler, Boris Gerrets, Matthias Muller and Clunie Reid.
Beginning and ending with a series of film trailers brought together by Scheibitz, this is a chance to find out about visual references for his own work.
22 February - 02 March and 14 - 20 April
Thomas Scheibitz (1999-2006)
03 - 09 March
Matthias Müller, Vacancy, 1998
10 - 16 March
Luke Fowler, Pilgrimage from Scattered Points, 2006
17 - 23 March
Katy Dove , Stop it, 2006
24 - 30 March
Borris Gerrets, Driving Dreams, 2006
preceeded by ZERO, 1996
31 March - 06 April
A K Dolven, Tilts only (his shirts), 2007
07 - 13 April
Clunie Reid, Life as you like it, 2007
Artists' statements:
AK Dolven
'Tilts only (his shirts)' is a mute 16 mm film projection that explores a sense of longing. The camera sits tight on the flimsy surface of a man’s shirts hanging side by side on a rail. The closeness of the lens creates optical distortions that render the camera’s object at once familiar and strange, intimate and distant. The tangibility of the shirts is fleeting. In their place there is an abstract, almost infinite colour field of lines and stripes that echo Newman’s onement (zip). The camera’s tilting movements are repetitive and relentless, looking its object over, again and again from top to bottom, in a mechanical yet sexualised gaze.
Katy Dove
The soundtrack was recorded on a single microphone during an improvised music session with friends and is kept fairly true to the original recording. The image follows the music in its unpredictable and uncertain path, dealing with strange unforeseen moments as they arise.
Like the sound the image is a simple edit involving overlapping images from a loose watercolour collage by the artist. The combination of sound and image create a brooding tension with an openness for the viewer to enter the work, and experience the creative decisions unfolding.
Luke Fowler
Pilgrimage from Scattered Points is a film about the English composer Cornelius Cardew (1936-1981) and The Scratch Orchestra (1968-73). Cornelius Cardew formed said orchestra with Michael Parsons and Howard Skempton in 1968, and published their draft constitution in The Musical Times in June 1969. The constitution set out the framework which would dominate the orchestra’s musical work for the first half of its existence. It proposed a fluid community where students, office workers, amateur musicians and some professional composers would gather together for performance, music making and edification.
In “Pilgrimage from Scattered Points” the internal contradictions and struggles of The Scratch Orchestra are related through first person interviews, recent and archive footage and predominantly unreleased music.
Boris Gerrets
A woman motorist was killed by a stone, hurled down deliberately from an overpass. it happened one night somewhere in the Netherlands. The incident becomes a looming presence in Boris Gerrets’ exploration of the anonymous world of the car-zone: motorways, petrol stations, parking-lots and cars. These peri-urban spaces generate a particular form of emptiness and desolation - where its inhabitants are confined in a world of glass, steel, speed and aural and mental noise.
Originaly commissioned for Dutch television, the film’s associative narration has a beginning and end, but – as Godard used to say – not neccesarily in that order.
Matthias Muller
Brasília, the 'city of hope', 'the ultimate utopia of the 20th century' (Umberto Eco), is being conserved as a cultural heritage today. It is a place as old as the filmmaker. The utopian city as represented in Vacancy is a place abandoned from its inhabitants, a museum kept alive by its staff only.
Clunie Reid
Each half of 'Life as you like it' is made up of five images which are double exposed in a digital camera and put in a sequence of AB/ BC/ CD etc. This creates the transparent flicker as there is an oscillation between two images at any one time and the sequencing smoothes out the transition from one image to the next. This piece is part of an ongoing exploration into how to present a static photographic image without ending up with a photograph.
Thomas Scheibitz
Thomas Scheibitz has been collecting the beginning and end of films since 1999. Not an artist’s film, rather a collection of visual references for his work; Scheibitz is interested in design, typography and the relationship between the letters and the moving image. He sometimes uses interesting names from the credits for the titles of his paintings.