Captions 2, details
Claire Manning An artist's statement To accrete n.05 movie stills transmutes a physically collaged picture I’ve made into a series of filmic moments. It fractures the experience of viewing into small slices that gradually reveal a whole, an exercise both in giving and in withholding. The approach awards a kind of halflife incapable of animating the dead image in any way but able to communicate my viewing perspective to a willing spectator. It’s an exploration of control; I cannot dictate how someone looks at my collaged picture on a wall, but films fix frame, order, and duration. The viewer may choose not to look at all but if they do they are subject to my rules. The piece originally began life as two disparate
images; an actresses’ twentieth century black and white publicity postcard paired with a ‘twin’ sourced from a contemporary fashion magazine, resulting in a collaged collaboration. Animating the results through film is yet another form of collage; a thing born from disparate fragments repositioned to create something new. The entire experience shifts itself across mediums - photographic, digital, collaged physical object, filmic stills - and there is no reason the dislocation should stop here for it could continue endlessly. My desire - what I’d like the film to provoke if I had the choice - is to create a fractured viewing experience that encourages careful looking and is perhaps more thought-provoking than simply encountering the picture that reveals all at a single glance.