1999 Test Gallery, Kirklees Media Centre, Huddersfield, UK.
1998 June 12-28 Red Gallery, Hull, UK.
1997 August 31 – September 7 Galeria Zamkowa, Lubin, Poland.
Visual landscapes may be seen as the most common theme of this exhibition by BellArtLabs. Each work comes from a different position, yet utilises the ethos of landscape. The coalescence of three individual positions allows for a new image to emerge, enabling a subjective study of the relationship of humans to the landscapes, while allowing other patterns, hidden, invisible, visual, physiological and technological to be explored.
Fields of Snow, Video installation – Tom Scott. Fields of Snow followed from a recognition and examination of a cultural context that had been occurring (1995), through the development and examination of the visual image, stripped down to the absolute basics which had the uncanny effect of revealing a much richer visual text. Simultaneously a British sensibility allied within a northern European ethos had occurred which came to be expressed as an image of falling snow flurries against a brick wall. Original shot on Super 8, digitised and worked within the digital domain, this allowed for the ability to work at the video field level, the work also deals with loops and repetition, the sound a phrase looped and repeated within which pitch, length and frequency changes have been introduced over time. Pushing and pulling with the plasticity of the image akin to animation, printmaking, painting and sculpture within time boundaries allowed for the deconstruction of the image. The image moves and relocates from the wall, to the eye, to the mind, challenging ideas of visual perception. The work is hardly a video, hardly a film, but more an image on a wall!
Lifeloop III, Super 8 installation – Chris Mizsak. Next, one is confronted with Chris Mizsak’s apparatus Lifeloop; an interactive filmic device inspired by the mechanics of the Victorian Zoe trope and the vastness of Cinema scope. This installation is based on the theme of ‘spinning’, in its multiplicity of variants: the many changing cycles of life – physical, technological, social and spiritual – that spin, whirl, revolve, turn, twist, coil and spiral. It creates a peripheral 360 degree vision with a sense of timelessness. The working of material is continued by the act of projection. Through the disintegration of projected film-loops – new composition a landscape is formed, a transmutation to a new world within the exhibition space. This is now seen as a video projection.
Mission, Video, spoken word – Tony Scott. Tony Scott’s Mission is derived from a poetical script, worked and reworked to create a history, embedded within the visual landscape. Utilising the corporeal elements of the physical world, a representation of day into night. Horsemen, a replication of a force constantly fluctuating between the ‘structure’ and the ‘landscape’. The thundering of hoof beats hovering inside the moving moving image. The chasm between the spoken word and the filmic image is bridged by Scott’s intent to tell a story of urban landscapes, home, family, love and desire.
Finally thus three perceptions are bound by the gallery space. If one acknowledges the whole exhibition as being components of a single mechanism, or a series of viewfinders into constructed landscapes – then perhaps one will sense that the unifying element of the group shows lies within the three individual soundtracks being played within the space.
First international showcase of time-based art using analogue and digital media presented in Lower Silesia. The event was sponsored by Cuprum 2000 (Polish Copper) and Hull School of Art & Design.