calendario eventi  :: 

X

27/3/2003

See. Be Seen.

VTO, London

Curated by Dolores Rocket

29th March - 20th April

Open 12 - 6pm Friday to Sunday or by appointment

Private View: Friday 28th March 6 - 10pm

The artists in SEE. BE SEEN. share a delight in the serendipitous, the accidental and the haphazard. In the chaos of London’s streets, they negotiate its infinite unfolding narratives – sometimes as voyeurs, sometimes as collaborators.

PAUL CASEY SPIKE EVES, is Sarah Chilvers collection of almost 200 hand-written notes discovered on the streets on her daily travels. Shopping lists, directions, reminders, and annotated receipts are randomly arranged alongside more bizarre or unsettling notes: wear the black suit for the mudering’ (sic), I am a glove puppet’; and poignant scrawled and solitary words: TO’ or chicken’.

However, it is the cumulative effect of the piece that starts to resonate with viewers as initially banal or illegible fragments begin to assume an odd familiarity. Gradually we experience an inevitable empathy with the anonymous authors of these discarded notes, whose daily concerns echo in some small way our own.

In the photographic series Drive By, Anne Hardy’s lens chances on pedestrians after dark as she speeds past them in a moving car. Disconnected from their immediate surroundings by the camera’s flashlight, the individuals are isolated, both literally and metaphorically. Hardy records (almost at random) the self absorption of these people who have perhaps, moments before, crossed paths with someone in another image; all eye contact avoided, a casual glance unnoticed.

Hardy’s series constructs an artificial bond between the viewer and her subjects, reifying the invisible links our journeys forge between us. What was a fleeting glimpse can now be scrutinised at leisure by the unforgiving eye.

In Sights Unseen, Julia Spicer documents her attempts to meet the reclusive European filmmaker Iris Schüfftan whose early experimental films - renowned for their abstract images and dislocation of a linear narrative - had for some time intrigued her. On discovering that the filmmaker had moved to London, Spicer contacted her, and Schüfftan responded by setting Spicer a number of tasks aimed at ‘re-acquainting’ her with the capital.

The resultant journeys recorded with a concealed camera (Schüfftan had instructed Spicer that no visual record of her journey should be made) perhaps ironically recall the fractured images, glimpses of details and texture of Schüfftan’s own films and convey the unseen reality of our everyday experience of the city, at ground level and on the move. For the exhibition at VTO Spicer has been loaned some rare photographs of Schüfftan herself along with some of the Director’s rarely seen notes.

In contrast, Anita Witek herself becomes the subject of the indiscriminate gaze of the CCTV cameras which happen to overlook the route from her home to her studio. The resultant video work Do you know what you are, do you know what you’ve done exposes the supposedly all-seeing eye of the surveillance camera as an oblivious observer.

Witek’s appropriation and reassemblage of the surveillance footage in which she appears, frame by frame, as an almost spectral figure, creates from the cameras’ casual sweep a film in which she takes the starring role and the incidental passers-by become bit-part players. Only with Witek’s intervention is the cameras’ function restored to seeing rather than merely passively recording.

The links between these works form subtle narratives themselves; was a note that Chilvers found mislaid by one of the incidental characters in Hardy’s prints? Did the CCTV camera in one of Spicer’s images ever record Witek’s reassembled video journey?

For more information and images please contact Eva on 07976 221 520 or Jari on 07766918992

Image: Julia Spicer, SiÅ s Unseen

Open: Friday to Sunday 12 - 6pm or by appointment

VTO
96 Teesdale St. London E2 6PU

stampa

permanent link