Vilma Gold

6 ARTISTS, 3 SHOWS
Tuesday evening openings
7, 14 and 21 July, 6:30-8:30 pm

Owen Land & Hannah Sawtell: 7- 12 July
Felix Gmelin & Amalia Pica: 14 - 19 July
Megan Fraser & Babette Mangolte: 21 - 26 July
Performance by Longmeg: Saturday 25 July, 7:30pm


WEEK ONE
OWEN LAND & HANNAH SAWTELL: 7- 12 JULY
OPENING TUESDAY 7 JULY, 6:30 ­ 8:30 PM

OWEN LAND

Undesirables (Work-In-Progress), 1999
Video transferred to vhs, b/w, sound, 12 mins

A rough-cut of selected scenes, edited as a sampler to be used in fundraising towards completion of the film "Undesirables". “The idea started with a casual comment made by Stan Brakhage, must have been way back in the early 1970s. It stuck in my mind. Now that I think about it, Brakhage may have meant this as a joke. He said, “Someday Hollywood will probably make a film about us,” ­ ‘us’ meaning the experimental filmmakers ­ “and I wonder which actors will play us?” Think about that first of all: the idea that Hollywood would make a film about experimental filmmakers is totally ridiculous. The fact that one would think about which actor was going to play me at some time in the future, I think that’s very funny. Eventually it germinated in my mind and I thought it was an interesting idea… A film about experimental filmmakers, especially in the very formative period, approximately 1968 to 1972. The movement went from a high point where there was a lot of publicity generated in the media, and seemed to peter out shortly after that. At a certain time, I guess it was in the 1980s, there was some discussion in film circles about the decline of the experimental film and people were theorising about why it happened and some people suggested maybe because of video, and I guess there were other theories too. So I thought, “Why not come up with a fantastic theory about why that happened?” ­ a fictional theory ­ and put that into a film?” (Owen Land, interviewed by Mark Webber, 2004)

Owen Land was born in Connecticut, USA in 1944. His films in the 1960s and 1970s are some of the first examples of the so-called "structural film" movement. Retrospective screenings of Land’s films have been held at the Edinburgh Film Festival, The Tate Gallery in London, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The first individual institutional exhibition of his work was held at Kunsthalle Bern from March through to May this year.


HANNAH SAWTELL

Rent (A youth of waste, a life of mess), 2009
Video, colour, sound, 7 mins

Hannah Sawtell's work proposes an engagement with means of production and the way form and image is disseminated. Works are sometimes deployed as satirical, 'Swiftian' observations, but often feel like odes to the forced, bittersweet evolution of use value. Sawtell teases out the vacillating beauty and numb homogeneity of the  current. With precision and an air of lyricism her work generates relationships between objects, creating balanced but contradictory dialectical encounters. In "Rent (A youth of waste, a life of mess)" a soundtrack of digitally edited civic sounds, such as a recording of a London shopping centre, accompanies a series of images pulled from internet product promotions and screensaver palettes. Between each image is a generic animated transition, as those commonly seen on computer slideshow presentations. Into this cycle Sawtell introduces methods of interruption so that the cyclical nature of the excess of production, taste and choice is sliced, chipped and parted. A new sculptural work by the artist will also be shown alongside the film. 

Hannah Sawtell graduated from Chelsea College of Art, London in 2006. She is currently completing an MA at the Royal Academy, London. Forthcoming exhibitions include the International Project Space, Bournville (2009).