Art Residencies

As part of the United event hosted by East Street Arts, which took place on Friday 26th June, I exhibited some work that I have created so far whilst on the residency at Lumen. I included four experimental works in the show- please see details below. I am still working on the sound installation mentioned in the last post, and hope to make the recording in the next couple of weeks at the DM Academy in Shipley.

Work In Progress
Lumen Screening Lab
Friday 26th June 2009

List Of Works

My Body Became Time
Looped 4 Screen Video Installation
54-Minute

For My Body Became Time I invited contemporary dancer Lucie Lee to explore and respond to the empty Lumen Screening Lab using her body. I strapped cameras to both of her legs, and asked her to hold a camera in each of her hands to capture movement from four different perspectives. As a result, the video cameras become extensions of her body, their weight and bulky shape determining how she navigates the space.

Isolated in the white room, the minutes and seconds unfold as Lucie cautiously begins to navigate the cameras around the boundaries of the room. Feelings of claustrophobia, frustration, isolation, restriction, and fear effect Lucie’s movements as she is faced with the new space. She suddenly feels more secure by the walls and corners, as the overwhelming feeling of the cameras weight, and the atmosphere the space creates, changes how she moves.

The boundaries of the space, of my minimal instructions, and the heavy and awkward cameras restrict her expression. She wants to shout, talk, bend, squat, sit, run. But she can’t. She wants to leave the room, get out of the situation entirely. She continues moving, determined to create the visual pathways she has been directed to take. Everything she knows about her profession is questioned, as her freedom of expression is taken away from her. The camera feel like part of her own body, and she feels like part of the camera. Lost in time, her movements become the only tangible reality.  Her body is her only notion of passing time.

(Written after a conversation with Lucie Lee about her experience in the Screening Lab.)

5957 Days
Looped Digital Video
12 min

When I was 10 years old, my school headmaster selected me, along with one other pupil, to place a time capsule in the newly built bridge in our small village. I was fascinated by the prospect that traces of my childhood, my existence, were going to be buried and then dug up 100’s of years later by people I would never meet. The time capsule was buried on the 5th March 1993. After the Time Capsule had been covered over with cement in its designated hole, I pushed my hands in to the surface leaving small prints as an additional record that I was there.

Every time I travel over the bridge, I imagine the artifacts that I compiled sitting within the grey cylinder of the Time Capsule. Traces of my life, and the lives of my childhood friends, are collected and preserved in this miniature museum right in the heart of Horbury Bridge.  As I grow older and time passes, the objects remain the same, until the bridge itself begins to collapse. In this small airtight compartment deep within the bridge, the artifacts escape the effects of time.

Ballet Steps
Looped Digital video
7 min 44 secs

There is no absence without presence. A red step is captured during a Ballet rehearsal. The dancers are present, their movements audible over the worn and tinny classical recordings. As the dancers get closer to the frame of the camera, their shadows flicker across the red fibres of the carpet. The frame captures a static object void of movement, yet the suggestion of movement is highlighted by the visual absence of the dancers. The work moves beyond the frame, as the un-captured image is suggested.

Absent Presence
Looped Digital Projection

The simple imagery projected site-specifically represents the surface on which it appears, forming layers of time through the space and its physical history.

 
 www.victorialucas.co.uk

Over the past month, the work I am currently developing at Lumen on my residency has significantly progressed away from my initial project proposal. Whilst still focusing on notions relating to photography and film, the absence of the real and the temporal nature of actuality, the work in progress focuses solely on the individual moment, rather than its immediate environment as initially planned. Stills, a piece that I created earlier this year whilst in Berlin, acts as a point of departure for this new thread of enquiry. Moving away from site specificity, Stills is an exploration in to the relationship between Photography and Film. 

Reminiscent of life and present on digital film, the inanimate taxidermy specimens imitate a series of photographs; petrified as if captured in one singular moment through the lifelike pose and appearance long after death. These portraits re-present a duration of time; their deceptive gaze seemingly watching time pass as the reflection of their spectators moves across the glass surface of their eyes.

Exploring the relationship between photography, film, and temporality, Stills presents the reality of the medium in which it is created. The moving image significantly conveys the temporal aspects of actuality, in relation to its existence as a subject affected and controlled by the forces of time. Here time is still present, but the most important characteristic of life, movement, has been extracted.

‘Stills’ 2009

The work I am creating at Lumen as part of my residency extracts the visual all together. Concentrating on audio recordings, I am developing an installation that removes the physical subject entirely. Working with a group of Ballet Dancers, the sound and vibrations created with their ballet shoes is recorded; archiving the contact noise between the points and the floor whilst they dance a ballet sequence in unison.

This sound will then be played back to an audience in a gallery, emerging from an empty constructed stage. Faced with the absence of the dancer, but left with an impression of a past moment, the viewer is provided with what seems like a moment of closeness in proximity to the dancer, whilst removing the physical body all together.