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Security Fugue. 2003. Two channel color video with sound.
4:00 loop.
Contrasting the promise of rescue with threats of captivity and
injury, “Security Fugue” examines personal responses
to crisis in the current arena of ubiquitous security. Images of
a rescue helicopter move across the screen in exaggerated slow motion,
while on a second screen, the camera tracks over aeriel views of
a hospital and rescue crew on the ground below. In the audio track,
stuttering confessions and dislocated murmurs echo in unison with
the constant rhythm of chopping helicopter blades which fills the
space.
Sources for the piece are varied; a small excerpt of a 35mm Hollywood
trailer from the early 1970's, a 16mm educational film about psychological
responses to disasters, taped recordings of phone calls made by
Patty Hearst from captivity in 1974, interviews with Hearst from
2003 describing her revisited experiences of captivity, and original
sound compositions by the artists.
The memory lapse of the amnesiac is taken as a starting point from
which to investigate the process of forgetting, remembering and
rewriting of recent memories. These editorial patterns of amnesia
are juxtaposed visually with images of physical constraint that
parallel the collective mental state of a society in a state of
siege.
Motion test A and B 1:30
Motion Test was made while in residency at the Atlantic Center for
the Arts in Spring of 2003, where the associate artists in residence
were experimenting with video works of very short duration.
Condensate- 1:30- 2004
Condensate was made while in residency at the Atlantic
Center for the Arts. Selected to work with artist Gillian Wearing,
the associate artists in residence were experimenting with video
pieces of very short duration. The length of the piece allowed ideas
of lifespan, termination, finality to develop in the works.
In Condensate, excerpts from a 1970's 16mm educational film titled
"Your Chance to Live" are re-edited and composited with
35mm slides taken from another source. The slides were allowed to
decay over time, with the image on each becoming corroded, and transferring
some of its photochemistry to its adjacent slide, creating an unusual
organic cross dissolve. This process of decay reinforces both the
imagery and the short duration of the piece, where images of children
sheltering from a tornado are distressed and obscured by image corrosion.
The title refers specifically to the process in Physics of creating
condensates, which was used to determine the editing and layering
structure of the work. Condensates are formed when atoms are isolated
and chilled to temperatures barely above absolute zero. At these
low temperatures, each atom displays identical properties, identical
position, energy, size, forming a super-atom, which in itself constitutes
a new form of matter.
Gwai-lo -. 6:00 - 2000
Gwai-lo combines footage shot in Hong Kong and Guang-dong province
with Irish and Chinese ghost mythologies to reflect on the effects
of consumerism on our perceptions of mortality, permanence, and
memory.
The camera tracks through the underground train system and brightly
lit neon shopping malls of the city, where the color saturation
and image contrast are manipulated to give the images a ghost-like
translucence. A beautiful stop-motion collage of moments captured
and lost creates a moving tableau of accidental identity, one where
each character is transferred for one moment out of the frenzied
chaos of the streets, and archived for a few slow frames.
In the soundtrack, an unidentified Cantonese voice calls out a list
of numbers, prices or identification codes, while white outlines
of ghostly hands calculate currency conversions in close up exchanges
and watches are compared for quality and price. A small sample from
an unsettling film soundtrack is reversed and time stretched to
create a haunting compositional backdrop, on top of which the camera
records strangers in brief moments of stillness. The camera finds
reflections in the towering silver and gold mirrored tower blocks
of Hong Kong's Central district, observing the people moving through
this city of new industry where financial workers are reflected
in the glittering surfaces of their workplaces. The piece ends as
it begins with arrival by train into a beautiful and dreamlike city
of ghosts.
New York based artists David Phillips (Memphis,
Tennessee 1970) and Paul Rowley (Dublin, Ireland
1971) have been working together collaboratively since 1998, primarily
with film, video installation and sound.
In 2000, they won the Glen Dimplex Artists’ Award, the Irish
Museum of Modern Art’s annual contemporary art prize, and
seen as the Irish equivalent of the Tate’s Turner prize. Their
short video Suspension was awarded a Golden Spire at the 1999 San
Francisco International Film Festival. In the same year they were
the recipients of the New Langton rts Bay Area Award for video.
Recent exhibitions include Re:mote at the Photographers’ Gallery,
London, Videonale at the Bonn Kunst Museum, and Bambi at the ICA
in Philadelphia. Their work was recently selected by New Museum’s
senior curator Dan Cameron to participate in the annual ev+a exhibition
in Limerick, Ireland, this spring.
Recent fesitval screeings include the Impakt festival in Holland,
special mention at the Zemos:98 festival in Sevilla, and retrospectives
at the Darklight Digital Festival in Dublin and Prog:ME, the Rio
de Janeiro festival of Media Arts.
Paul has been artist in residence at the Atlantic Center for the
Arts, Florida, with Gillian Wearing, and a fellow at the Macdowell
Artist Colony in New Hampshire. He has received awards from the
Irish Arts Council for his work in 1998, 1999, 2000, and 2001, in
addition to bursaries in 2001 2003, and 2004, and a development
grant from the Irish Film Board in 2002.
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