The artists in the exhibition 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.
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