There’s a couple of shows that counterpoint the Onscreen season and gallery exhibition, Now Showing.
Lewis Klahr, SixtySix, Anthony Reynolds Gallery, until 22 February 2014
Klahr makes work by rescuing, collating and collecting fragmentary images into miniature tableaux which are seized, shot by shot, with a 35mm digital still camera and built into complex sequences. As Tom Gunning writes:
‘Klahr’s collage films have always mimed the processes of memory by pulling together the discards of contemporary life (images from ads, text books or comic books, objects such as game pieces, menus, playing cards) into scenarios that seem like some old Hollywood film dimly remembered… Instead of characters, Klahr gives us the play of enigmatic spaces and empty sites that promise both the invitation of desire and the discovery of crime.’
Image: Lewis Klahr, Sixty Six (installation view, Anthony Reynolds Gallery). Image courtesy of the artist and Anthony Reynolds Gallery.
Warren Garland, The Head Fountain, West Lane South Gallery, until 22 February 2014
In The Head Fountain Warren Garland lays out the segments of King Vidor’s 1949 film, the Fountainhead (adapted from Ayn Rand’s 700-page novel of the same name) in reverse order.
As well as an entertaining (and refreshing) diatribe against the iniquities of neo-liberal capitalism, Paul O’Kane’s text (download here), written to accompany the screening of Garland’s film, is an interesting coda to a key theme that runs through Now Showing. O’Kane considers how the restructuring of an existing narrative enables new narratives to emerge, whilst prompting a reconsideration of the ‘original’ and emphasising the importance of context in our reading of a work.