switch 2015
SWITCH SWITCH CONTEMPORARY CONTEMPORARYVIDEO VIDEOART ART
JO B QVCMJD DPOUFYU JO B QVCMJD DPOUFYU edited editedby byTriona TrionaRyan, Ryan,Harald HaraldTurek Turek
switch 2015
15th - 22nd November 2015, Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, Ireland
Since 2008, the switch project is a continuing investigation into place, locating art in public space in a contextually focused way. International film and video artworks are back projected for one week onto the windows of shops and other spaces throughout the town.
Switch locates itself outside of the big city and applies itself to the rhythm of smaller places. The film events initiate conversations between artists and audiences, artworks and their sites. Now in its 7th year, switch is an artist-led project funded & supported by the Tipperary Arts Office. Switch is a project by Triona Ryan & Harald Turek.
Foreword
Mark Neville participating artist Switch 2015
Switch presents 8 film works from the artist Mark Neville. The 8 pieces span the artists career from his early works “The Jump Films”, started in 1995, to the more recent film works made as a war artist embedded with the British Army in 2011, such as “Bolan Market”. It is a rare occurrence to have a selection of films that convey a breath of work by one artist spanning almost two decades. All of the works are shot in 16mm film. The artist’s quiet enduring dedication to this medium is breathtaking. Using the material of film requires a certain pacing and skill, there is no immediate deleting or second chance. It is point, frame and shoot. The artistic thought process that occurs, begins before the film is loaded. The completed film and the act of film making lends a particular expression. Part performance, part social documentary the selected works are robustly investigative of its subjects, its contexts and itself. This is also apparent in the dissemination of his work. Neville often works with close knit communities in the realisation of his pieces.
Switch 2015 presents these film works together in place and in time. It is Nenagh. It is November. The evenings are long and collars are turned up braced against the chill in the air. As you traverse your familiar route through your town, have a look. Take a moment, this is for you.
After Muybridge
2005, 16mm film, mute, 3mins 11 secs, looped
This work employs a four by three metre backdrop made from wood, string, and cloth, emulating the one used by Muybridge in his well-known photographic series. Passers-by and shoppers who chanced past the frame, which was erected opposite an alley way at the back of the artist’s studio in Glasgow, were filmed using a high-speed (slow motion) film camera. A dialogue is established with the original Muybridge series, with both works using state of the art (for their day) motion analysis equipment.
Sack Race
2007, 16mm film, 7 mins 30 secs, looped, with soundtrack
This slow-motion film was made in Port Glasgow with the cooperation of a local school. It records a sports day, and couples it with the soundtrack from ‘Kes’, the 1969 film by Ken Loach (a film that also features an emotional scene on a sports field). The footage seems historically vague, as if it could have been shot at any time over the past forty years, an impression further reenforced through association with ‘Kes’ . The work implies that conditions amongst working communities have not changed in four decades. The use of high-speed cinematography and sentimental music also suggests that social documentary techniques can only hope to aestheticise their subject matter.
Backdrops
2011, 9 mins 46 secs, digital transfer from 16mm film
Filmed on the frontline in Helmand against backdrops depicting photographic or painted artworks from previous conflicts, ‘Backdrops’ dislocates elements of real life from the Province which are commonly presented to us by the media. Through a series of vignettes, life in the war zone is relocated to previous eras, and itself becomes part of a cycle of wars and their depictions. This contextualisation not only works to make us re-examine the works of Nash, Piper and Burke, and to relate these to war now, but also makes us re-examine our numbed response to the over-saturation of mediated images of Helmand.
Fancy Pictures
2008, 16MM FILM LOOP, 18 MIN
The term ‘Fancies’ was first used in 1737 by art chronicler George Vertue to describe paintings by Mercier of scenes of everyday life, but with elements of imagination, invention or storytelling. Later, the name ‘fancy pictures’ was given by Sir Joshua Reynolds to the supreme examples of the genre produced by Gainsborough in the decade before his death in 1788, featuring rural life in particular. Shot in the grounds of Mount Stuart and on Bute farms, the film ‘Fancy Pictures’ features several ultra slow motion sequences of indigenous animal life filmed in front of backdrops taken from Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century portrait paintings in the Dining Room at Mount Stuart. The portraits include works by Sir Joshua Reynolds, Allan Ramsay and Sir Henry Raeburn. The film questions the role of landscape in portrait painting, the changing relationships between landowners and animal life, and creature symbolism in film history. Technological advances in photographic techniques, and how we use them to frame animals, say as much about value systems in Britain today, as a painting by Reynolds tells us about the aristocracy’s relationship to the land two hundred years ago. This connection was made using backdrops, so that the wildlife action in the foreground seems like an elegant graffiti.
Bolan Market
2011, 6 mins, digital transfer from 16mm film
Bolan Market in Lashkar Gah, Helmand, is described as a success story by ISAF forces. Much of the population of Helmand Province survives through subsistence farming, often contending with brutal weather conditions, lack of clean drinking water, and basic or non-existent health and education facilities. Previously part of Taliban ran territory, the area including Bolan Market began to flourish once again following its occupation by ISAF forces. Mobile phones, cars, and market stalls speak of the beginnings of commerce and trade. Nevertheless, Neville’s silent, slow motion film depicts a much more complex relationship between the local population and British armed forces. Neville shot the 16mm film by hand as he stood next to the machine gun which the ‘Husky’ armoured vehicle he was travelling in is armed with. When he requested if he could film on the ground, amongst locals, Neville was told by the crew of the ‘Husky’ that there were many Taliban sympathisers in the Market, and that he would either be ‘killed or kidnapped within twenty minutes’ were he to leave the tank. Whilst some of the local faces Neville films are apparently warm in their reaction to Neville’s camera, and the presence of the tank as it proceeds through the Market, others are clearly feeling deeply uncomfortable, disturbed, or angered by the procession. Neville’s film is only made possible through the deployment of an armoured vehicle and its crew: The footage is mediated through an apparatus of war and an occupying force, forming a disturbing meditation upon the relationship between subject and viewer.
Flurobirds
2006, 16mm film, 5 minutes
Shown as part of the exhibition ‘Animal Architecture’, the work was made in collaboration with Glasgow University biomedical scientist Dr. Kate Arnold, whose cutting edge research investigates how budgerigars fluoresce (this is only visible to us under ultraviolet light), and how this fluorescence is employed to attract a mate. Together, they worked on the production of the first ever slow motion movie [under ultraviolet light] of live burdgerigars as they fluoresce and attract each other. The results are enchanting and surreal. The domestic forms another central plank of the work, in which Neville approaches the regeneration / gentrification of Camlachie, in Glasgow’s then run-down East End, with a wry scepticism. Comparing nesting habits with homes, examining the benefit of tearing down property rather than rebuilding it, Neville asks pointed questions about our obsessive cataloguing of nature and our desire to fit people into demographic boxes. The use of colour by these seemingly simple birds is far more sophisticated than previously thought: complex patterns only the birds can see are deeply intertwined with the mating ritual. These birds, he suggests, see more than you think.
Jump Film NÂş1
1995 - 2006, 16mm film
The film documents a jump or a fall, shot at thousands of frames per second and was made using a high speed scientific camera that is normally used in scientific research or car crash testing. The premise was to scientifically document an event that could not be quantified in scientific terms, and to investigate a mythology associated with ‘heroic’ male performance artists such as Bas Yan Ader, Yves Klein, and others. A series of three, each film is shot at different speeds, in different locations, to give a contradictory notion of jumping, or falling.
Jump Film Nº3
1995 - 2006, 16mm film
The work explores how our experience of performance art history from the 1960’s and the 1970’s is mostly confined to grainy, still images taken from films or videos, in art history books. This format is echoed in that of the high-speed films, which seem to reduce every event to a series of grainy photographic stills that only change incrementally, and that make this connection between film, and still images seen in art history books, more explicit. Thus, ‘The Jump Films’ also make comment on the way in which early performance art films and photographs existed only as a perfunctory document of an action that was itself the intended artwork. (As opposed to these performance art films that explore the nature of film as the artwork].
edited by Triona Ryan & Harald Turek © 2015 switch & Mark Neville published by switch 2015, www.s-w-i-t-c-h.org Triona Ryan is a visual artist from Nenagh, Co.Tipperary. Her art practice has included performance, sculpture, photography, video & curation. The exploration of familiar & unfamiliar places is a key part of her practice. www.trionaryan.com Harald Turek is an artist, designer, curator and cultural DIY specialist. He is the founder of the artist books publishing house ‘A Shoal of Mackerel’, and co-organiser of the biennial ‘Glasgow International Artists‘ Bookfair’. www.haraldturek.com
Switch pays a special thanks to local shop owners who have supported the project by loaning the premises for the duration.
the switch event is funded by
hctiws 5102
www.s-w-i-t-c-h.org