“The film and video artist Malcolm Le Grice (1940-, UK) has written about the issues raised by the emergence of the non-linear manipulation and its implications for film and video from ideas that have emerged from his own fine art practice, including a sustained period of working with accessible digital technology. In work such as Arbitrary Logic (1986), Sketches for a Sensual Philosophy (1988) and Digital Still Life (1989), Le Grice worked with inexpensive home computers (initially the Sinclair Spectrum and the Atari) to explore the potential of the digital and its implications for moving image within a fine art context.” …
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‘The Independents’ – Co-presented by The Art gallery of Ontario and Cinematheque Ontario. Programme of events including a talk by Malcolm LeGrice and screening of ‘Digital Still Life’.pdf here
Stills from the video work ‘Digital Still Life’.pdf here …
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A short video piece from the late eighties, Atherton as The Sculptor describes a site specific work involving life-size models of rock climbers installed on a mountainside somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales. Atherton delivers an underplayed and almost believable monologue about the realization of the project, before laying bare the entire charade at the end of the piece when it is revealed that the monumental sculpture is in fact a small stone on the table top with miniature plastic figures glued to it. …
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“Many strands unite in The Sounds of These Words, 1990, a piece made – and shown – for tv broadcast as another kind of ‘intervention’, but which demands repeated viewing. Its portrait head is ‘a speaking likeness’ in the realist tradition, but streams of text and sampled sound are used to digitally rescore the typographic revolution of the early modernists, from Marinetti to Cage and concept art, for the age of audiovisual technology and semiotics. …
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A television newsreader recounts the minutiae of small-town life with due solemnity, but reveals a disturbing element of anarchic behaviour amongst the town’s old-age pensioners. Breakwell’s parodic take on television news is given gravitas by his use of the ‘real’ Border Television Newscaster, Eric Wallace.
ICA Gallery cinema events programme April 1982.pdf here.
Members Newsletter from ‘Kettle’s Yard’ including Ian Breakwell exhibition invitation. pdf here.
Description card for Ian Breakwell’s works including ‘The News’, …
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‘This is a table-top tableau of personal items, toys, drinks, cigarettes, actions and non-verbal visual viewpoints.
Though each is innocuous enough on its own, there is a sense of malice-aforethought in the collection of things in time and space against an un-specific black background. This is a sketchbook on video. A noting of starting or end points. Certain and uncertain. This was the last video-art piece I made for several years and is exploratory of expressing my own position as a person at that time, …
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‘An auto-focus-pulling play between a woman working at home sewing while watching an ice-skating diva on TV. Through the spectacles of the worker, the camera drifts in and out of focus between the two, leaving a viewer of the piece watching the watcher watching the watched.’ David Critchley …
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“With Trialogue I was beginning to want to work in a more controlled way, trying to use video across multiple monitors and multiple layers of recording to explore ideas that went beyond looking at the nature of the medium. This piece layers three parts of a single narrative across three monitors contained within a single tape. I think it was the first time I used words in a narrative sense in a video tape – …
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