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JUDE WALTON
PARALLA X 2 May - 8 June 2002 Jude Walton was in residence at the EAF 29 April to 8 May and gave a gallery talk on Tuesday 7 May. Paralla x was an installation that worked an effect - rather than making a proposal, or offering an allegorical journey, a rebus or narrative of meanings. It offered (two) contrasting experiences of bodily movement and orientation via video projections in semi-discrete parts of the EAF gallery space. These both threw large images (almost floor-to-ceiling & correspondingly wide). One entered via the bookshop, turning right to move between narrowing walls that funneled the viewer into centre gallery. Along the facing wall ran a continuous, serendipitous path of ribbon lighting, activated on entry. This had a fairy-tale aspect, but also read as a trail and, retrospectively, as the path of a dancer. At centre gallery one addressed the moving image of a dancer (shan-tung Viet Cong black pants & simple boat-neck jumper - i.e., no tu-tus). The film was black & white and of wondrous, broadcast quality: you could see the skin print on the dancer's feet; the clothing and half-tones in the image were austerely luxuriant. It looked like dramatic, Magnum-era photography. Situated at centre screen, making slow, simple movements - of extending limbs, bending & straightening, a simple vocabulary - the filmed dancer ensured a range of ever-shifting black-&-white symmetries. The same series of movements was filmed from a number of angles, including directly above and below (through a glass floor). The image was hypnotic to a degree and inculcated an empathy with the figure as it tested weight and balance: the body as a kind of module. The other major component was footage of a misty, befogged lake. It was experienced at first as landscape scene: birds flying past in slightly slow motion. After a time we realize we view this through glass: faults and a stain or two on the glass made this apparent. The train is in motion: we saw a long, straight, flat, distant bridge. The girders of a railway bridge (that we infer we are on) figured in the image. The film, then, situated the viewer as passively transported through wider space. By contrast the filmed dancer was not so simply visual spectacle but induced a more haptic identification of the viewer with its movement, a physical projection. A sound component suggested the irregular displacement of weight, sounds of shifting and movement. The landscape film had a soundtrack (via headphones) that gave the cocooning but mildly anxious feel of rail travel. Three other elements functioned to firm up and direct our reading/response: a small monitor played a computer-generated stick-figure in illustrative, Muybridge mode, dancing; a large pile of white wooden stakes or staves suggested the entropic stasis of fiddlesticks; an electric train ran on a circular path, on scaffolding that held it, elegantly, about eye-height above the ground. This train, like the ribbon lighting, was sensitive to the viewer's presence and circled only when approached closely enough. Triggering it had the effect of referring one from consciousness of one's own movement (and from identification with the projected dancer) to the on-board, kinetic experience of the lake - to the film running at the other end of the gallery. Ken Bolton An A2 double sided poster/catalogue, designed by the artist with text by Mark Minchinton was produced to accompany the project. |
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above: documentation: installation details |
Documentation Photography by Michal Kluvanek |