Around About/LIFT

Factory Media Gallery Series presents AROUND ABOUT / LIFT: two single-channel video pieces concentrating on the physical perception of moving through

Friday, August 9, 2013 — 7-11pm

AROUND ABOUT 
Steve Shaddick

Around About is a fluid interpolation of time and space, presenting a simple narrative that folds upon itself like a Mobius strip. Two scenes in the same physical space (but different time) are juxtaposed against themselves but melted together by a continuous right-to-left camera pan. The first scene is a man adjusting a picture frame on a wall, the second scene is the same action except with a different man and physically reversed – the furniture on the left in the first scene appears on the right in the second. In both scenes, the men meet and leave the other to rearrange the furniture once again. Each scene is constantly revealed and concealed, almost as frames in a video, or photos on a film strip. But the palindrome narrative defines a circle within the line, a circle that only exists with the line. In the same way that the ground appears flat but we know it to be curved, Around About examines how two opposing truths can define themselves.

LIFT
Shlomi Greenspan

Lift explores the movement of time through visual manipulation. The sequence of events unfold and reverse, creating a visual palindrome, where beginning and end are indeterminable.  Lift takes the viewer on a cyclical journey through an institution, in a sense a lieu vague, via a freight elevator. The moving elevator acts as a cinematic mechanism, mimicking the collection of individual frames our human eyes perceive as the moving image. At times the video appears to stop, suggesting a still image within the progressing narrative. Informed by Samuel Beckett’s tragicomic Waiting for Godot, Lift unfolds as a series of movements. These actions seemingly have no results, occupying only time itself, disrupting the assumed purpose of a performing a task. Time is attenuated, actions are trivial yet seemingly normal, as the video loops back and forth ad infinitum.

Curated by Steve Shaddick