Rosa Barba / Andrew Bracey / Film Material Soup / Dave Griffiths / Cathy Lomax / Elizabeth McAlpine / David Reed / John Rimmer

Andrew Bracey / John Rimmer

This exhibition developed from the research interests and artworks of the curators, Andrew and John. They both employ digital collage to cut and paste cinematic imagery to produce and play with new forms and received meaning. The selected artists explore these ideas in diverse ways to work with narrative and new forms of materiality. With the access to digital formats, of the internet and the digitisation of film, artists are now able to appropriate films to create different and innovative approaches to collage. This makes us look anew at, and re-address, the familiarity of moving image, media and the cinema space; a hybridised ‘cinematic’ experience.

The art in this visually exciting group exhibition continues the lineage of collage; to cut up, reposition and rearrange cinema’s near endless supply of imagery. Orson Welles’ unfinished version of Don Quixote features a scene where Quixote slashes at a screen in a cinema. This scene acts as a lynchpin for the ideas contained within the curatorial strategy of this exhibition, expanding on the notion of Quixotic, intertexturality and the slippage of reality and illusion. The artists bridge the analogue and the digital, working with both the two modes. As Nicolas Bourriaud states in his book Postproduction that “an ever increasing number of artworks have been created on the basis of pre-existing works, more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products.” The artists in this show exploited the possibilities outlined by Bourriaud to mine cinema’s new digital archive using a wide range of media, from projections and monitor based work through to digital prints, painting and even a microfiche viewer.

The programme of events accompanying this exhibition included an artist talk from Cathy and a gallery takeover from collective Film Material Soup.