TAKE 291: 08-09-2005

PAUL GRIMMER - TENDERNESS (MiniDV, 5 minutes 30 seconds)

The real or imagined danger of experiencing yourself without boundaries. Raising questions

of self-control and the desire to define and maintain an ideal which can so easily be penetrated and corrupted. The line between reality and imagination is drawn out by the precise accuracy of the blade's journey. Constant reaffirmation of self underpins a structured existence.

ORIE TERRADA - A HANDFUL OF RICE (MiniDV, 17 minutes)

"My work is about communication between people. Recently, I have attempted to generate events where people can interact. Utilising the universal medium of food, I generated an event using 'rice balls' with the aim of bringing people together. Due to the ephemeral nature of events. I condense the gualities in each event into the documentational evidence. The everyday simple things are elevated by their inclusion - rice balls become art. The event becomes communication and unity

Look out for Orie distributing her homemade Rice Balls throughout the evening!

EVE GORDON - TWO VIVID ANIMATIONS (35mm, 9 minutes)

Two visual ideas of cacophony in vivid marker on 35mm film animated by Eve and composed by Sam Hamilton. Both are artists working in New Zealand.

Fuck Horizontal follows a series of vertical lines sliding down bright red film. The lines warp, merge, accumulate and grow to a visual cacophony of black on red. A series of cello tracks are heard accompanying the flow and manipulation of the lines, alluding to and expanding a technique used by some of the first film improvisers

In contrast, the narrative of Vertical or Backwards seems to be determined by the music. The ocean-like wash of cello seems responsible for the movement of the one line slowly curling into a koru on luminescent blue film - "like watching someone giving birth".

RUTH HINKEL-PEVZNER - THE FISHING TRIP (16mm, 3 minutes)

A fictional reminiscence of summers and fish, when dad would leave for his annual fishing trip and the routine of home life would unravel, narrated over found footage.

HEIDI VILKMAN - DREAMING SIDEWAYS (Super 8 and 16mm, 22 minutes)

Dreaming Sideways is an exploration into the dreams of three individuals, who either have no visual concept, or whose current experiences of the world are based on other sensory experiences than visual. The short documentary conveys personal insights and emotions to experiencing blindness, through particularly vivid and evocative use of film images, animation and sound.

CLIO LLOYD-JACOB - THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY (MiniDV, 16mm and lines, 5 minutes)

A mixture of live action and animated sequences from still drawings and paintings, with self-created sounds, this film explores the idea of the self-reflected in our relationship with the other. and is a search for understanding of inner passions.

EDWARD ROBERTS-GRAVER - SCAPE (Super 8mm, 7 minutes)

Scape is a piece which tries to deal with the memories and feelings that arise when travelling, when away from home or when looking back on a journey. The longing sickness for something familiar and homely, the discovery of new things and bizarre memories that could have been dreams.

OLIVER PIETSCH - DRUGGED (MiniDV, 15 minutes)

A compilation of what's going on in the head of drugged movie-characters.

HANNAH GAL - BREATHE (16mm 4 minutes)

A beautifully crafted, award-winning short filmed entirely under water.

STEVEN BALL - THE DEFENESTRASCOPE and THE NEXT SIX MINUTES the next six minutes (6:12, 2002)

Inner-city South London one Sunday in March. The view from the twentv-first floor collides with sound to image to sound experiments in a fast rhythmic mix. The fragmented montage becomes digital aphasia collapsing into abstracted spatio-temporal articulation. The video is divided into 3 roughly unequal sections. Each is prefaced by a scratched scrubbed sequence of the videomaker saying something, however only a few gasps of words emerge. Rhythmic, repetitive, scratched images of the inner-urban landscape and colourful abstraction builds shifting looping rhythms, the abstracted clicks and whirrs of digital interference as abstracted musical image.

The Defenestrascope (5:40, 2003) throws the view through windows from monumental towers, in contemporary and medieval European city and town. This eccentric exploration of urbanised space is determined by a musical system in the form of a sample ensemble setting of the traditional 16th century Norfolk song Go from the Window, framed by a fragmented clapping rhyme. A neo-rococo vaudevillian romp dedicated to Alan Lomax and Gus Elen.

go from the window, throw from the window

downsteps upstairs, upsteps downstairs

down in the street. out in the street

the wind is in the west, the cuckoo's in the nest

along the canal, down from the torre

bicycle piazza, amphitheatre

through the agora, crossing the ringroad

a ladder and some glasses, a rope and a pulley

crossing the platz, along the strasse

out of the window. down from the window

Take 291 is curated by Charlie Phillips for 291 Gallery