6/12/2002
Julie Henry
Impressions Gallery, York
Photo and Video works. Julie Henry's work explores the means of fantasy and escapism, investigating the symbolic activities through which her subjects seek to ascend above the everyday.
Photo and Video works
Julie Henry's work explores the means of fantasy and escapism, investigating the symbolic activities through which her subjects seek to ascend above the everyday.
A Film and Video Umbrella Commission.
Film and Video Umbrella curates and produces film, video and new media projects by artists, which are commissioned and presented in collaboration with galleries and venues across England.
Julie Henry's photographic and video works inhabit the strangely-familiar world of contemporary subcultures. In deliberate contrast to the today's slick, popularly sanctioned iconographies of sport and celebrity, Henry's camera spotlights the all-too-human profiles of frequently overlooked protagonists - the amateur talent show contestant, the video-game whiz-kid, the local pub hotshot, the neighbourhood 'face' _ in a series of still and moving-image works that are as stark and compelling as they are disarming and affectionate. Henry_s video This Sporting Life (2002) is inspired by the fast-disappearing social phenomenon of 'pub-sports'(arm-wrestling, table-football, skittles etc). The piece takes footage from the cult Yorkshire TV series Indoor League (originally broadcast from 1973-79 and arguably the high-spot of pub-sport exposure) and re-works it using current digital post-production techniques. Sequences from the Indoor League table-skittles final of 1973 are inter-cut with newly created computer animated 'replays' of the action and overlaid with modern digital graphics and player profiles. In an adjoining gallery, Henry's video X is an astutely observed portrait of another local hero - the teenager who has set the highest-ever score on the videogame machines in London_s Trocadero. Seen alongside This Sporting Life, it also offers a passing comment on how the Space Invaders machine has ousted the dartboard from the contemporary pub environment. Another video work, Out of Time (2002), receives its premiere staging at Impressions. A vivid visual record of a group of dancehall veterans who have continued to meet at the same place in Cambridge for more than thirty years, the piece acts as an evocative reminder of the tribal allegiances of community, the allure of nostalgia and the passing of time. This exhibition is the first survey show of Julie Henry's work to be staged in this country and has been curated in collaboration with Film and Video Umbrella. Stephen Bode, Director Film and Video Umbrella
Image: 'Mamma He's Making Eyes at Me' 2000 Photograph
Impressions Gallery
29 Castlegate
York YO1 9RN UK
t +44 01904654724
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