PureScreen 6: Phantasmagoria

Castlefield Gallery presents ‘Phantasmagoria’, a programme of recent artist film and video curated from Open Submissions in 2004/05. Supported by Arts Council England.

Venue: King’s Arms, Salford

PROGRAMME NOTES:

Erica Scourti Trailer Truths 1 2004 1’55”
Text taken from a wide range of movie trailers is collaged together to create a darkly humorous take on war, evil and propaganda.

Naoko Takahashi Combing 2004 40”
Video as painting; investigating the relationship between the word and the action.

Allsopp & Weir No Fly Zone: Artivists 2004 3’
One in a series of films, which attempt an imaginary mapping of zones of potential flight (take-off and escape). Filmed from the air by a specially modified kite/surveillance camera, unstable, frantic images of the site and the people below are produced. Participants are invited to form temporary communities of flight and attempt to organise themselves around the kite/surveillance camera. Set to a soundtrack of flight messages, choreographies of lift, crash and drag, infused by the whims of the wind, are recorded for future screening. The first series constructs an alternative cartography of sites of unexploded bombs across London.

Lee Cavaliere Poet Sightings 2003 2’50”
The Poet, a shy, semi-feral creature, is sighted getting back to nature in the Lake District.

Beagles & Ramsay Two Skeletons Fighting Over A Pickled Herring 2003 3’45”
Beagles and Ramsay attempt to conjure up the ghost of Belgian painter James Ensor.

Riccardo Iacono Fuzzy Lover 2003 2’06”
B&W silent film composed of sampled and recycled sequences of digital and chemically manipulated live video and abstract animation. Exploring forms that emerge through the interaction of different materials and processes. Focusing on the problems of authenticity, identity and representation associated with reproduction; the hybridisation of culture – fusion and explosion.

Pil & Galia Kollectiv Kustom Kar Inferno 2003 4’45”
The fetishistic world of Kustom Kars is reinvested with mechano-mythical significance. The motorik-satanic qualities inherent to these egomaniacal creations and the redundancy built unto the history of the automobile are merged into a nostalgic future cult, a history of roads and needs emanating from the closed circuit of consumer logic.

Oliver Lamb The Real Charlie Cheese & His Pigeon Spectacle 2003 6’
We live in a time when foolishness should be avoided, going to great lengths to avoid looking silly, and in a lot of cases ending up looking sillier. ‘The Real Charlie Cheese’ explores how this breakdown of integrity was once celebrated, drawing on references from both classic silent cinema and slapstick, and the popular sixteenth century Europe ‘fool societies’ whose members held important social positions.

(INTERMISSION)

Steven Ball The Defenestrascope 2003 5’46”
Throwing the view through windows from monumental towers in contemporary medieval European city and town. This eccentric exploration of urbanised space revolves around a setting of the traditional 16th century Norfolk song ‘Go From The Window’, reconstructed from an ensemble of samples from a variety of sources.

Allsopp & Weir Scene 2004 3’46”
An event scene, which asks the question, ‘what happened’? A rewriting of failed terrorist attacks.

Matt Jones A Drag 2004 3’32”
Filmed in a classic cinematic style a pair of hands appear to be dragged over rough terrain. The repetitive imagery and accompanying sound shift the viewer’s mindset from the disturbed to the ridiculous.

Beagles & Ramsay Dead Of Night 2003 5’26”
Shot in two Victorian Glasgow Theatres – The Kings and the sadly dilapidated Britannia Panopticon Music Hall, the oldest surviving music hall in the UK. A pair of ventriloquist’s dummy self-portraits were made over a period of six months and star in the video. The title is taken from the 1945 Michael Redgrave supernatural chiller in which a ventriloquist is driven insane by his crazed dummy alter ego.

Edward Adam & Sara Fletcher, Trick Films Rosy Palm 2003/4 1’
Taken from a short series of hand developed super-8 films, celebrating the optical illusions and magical disappearances of early cinema.

Graeme Stonehouse The Nelson Riddle 2002 10’
Filmed during Mike Nelson’s exhibition at the ICA, ‘Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted’, Stonehouse investigates the mysterious appearance and subsequent disappearance of the ‘Nelson’s Ices’ ice-cream van parked nearby.

utk Limelight 2004 2’03”
A ludicrous wind-up chick jerks, shuffles and tap dances its way into a pool of light. Jumping slows to tipping, and the chick falters like some huge lumbering animal, each lurch more untenable than the last. With an unearthly sound it finally falls flat on it face.

MORE ON PURESCREEN:
PureScreen is Castlefield Gallery’s regular screening event for artist’s film and video. The programme provides a platform for outstanding recent work and aims to support new and emerging practitioners and curators.

Further PureScreen 04/05 screenings will take place on 21st January, 18th February and 18th March 2005, 7-9pm at The King’s Arms, 11 Bloom Street, Salford. M3 6AN. Visit www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/purescreen for programme details and PureScreen: Film & Video Artists Information Pack.

For further details, or if you have any comments or suggestions, please contact:
Sophia Crilly, Programme Co-ordinator, Castlefield Gallery on 0161 832 8034 or email purescreen@castlefieldgallery.co.uk.