Elizabeth McAlpine – Cinematic sediments

Mostra personale

Comunicato stampa

The solo show entitled cinematic sediments features
for the first time a selection of works by the artist
which best attest to her interest in this special “film
geology”. The selection includes six type prints from the
cycle The Ends, begun in 2013: a series of single images
based on the residual photograms that makes up the
physical, rather than the narrative, end of film time.
Taken from 35mm film, these end strips have recorded
the accidental treatment of man and time (scratches,
dust, overexposures, etc.) and are superimposed over
one another by the artist, in a geology of optics and
time, which (finally) leads to a single image that is
often broken down into an aniconic apparition: a central
void lined at the sides by smears and bright chromatic
rings that are defined in the so-called soundtrack of the
film. A second paradigmatic work on display is the very
recent The Raid from 2015 in which the artist rearranges
the film of the eponymous video into seven strips, so
that the photograms are physically superimposed upon
each other, thus creating a narration by means of their
very materiality; it follows a method which McAlpine
has adopted for other works: “I am interested in the
materiality of film, but not nostalgia, I am drawn to the
materiality of film, as it is the only medium where you
are able to witness time as a real physical material, time
as a length, to be able to see a second of time as a real
physical length to hold it in my hand is appealing to me
in the same way that to look at a cliff face and to see a
millennia of time in the layers of stone and material of our
landscape is”.