Blinc and ...But Still

Richard Page, ‘Stuffed hare’, photograph.

REVIEW

G39, Cardiff 12 January – 10 February

Reviewed by: Heather Phillipson

Running concurrently, 'Blinc' and '...But Still' are linked not by any common theme or motive but by their apparent divergence. 'Blinc', a series of night-time screenings showing new video work deals with the moving image. '...But Still', a gallery-based exhibition, explores ideas relating to stillness and the frozen image. Paradoxically, '...But Still' is not still at all but shifting; it moves between familiar and unfamiliar territory; being and non-being; life and death. It continually shifts the audience from something to nothing.

There are Richard Page's photographic portraits of taxidermic forms, animals frozen forever in movement, both predator and prey. In the darkness of the city nightscape, these preserved offerings take on an uncertain state somewhere between life and death.

Moving upstairs in the gallery, another shift between states is orchestrated by Ben Stammers who translates accidental or imperfect snapshots into carefully painted portraits. Stammers balances artist and audience in an unsettled, changeable place.

And up again, to a space where the quiet metamorphosis of Helen Clifford's charred photographs is met by Philip Babot's contemplative performance. He is still, a figure in black against the gallery-white wall. Staring up into the blackness of the attic space he is met by his reflection in a mirror above; shifting from watcher to watching to watched.

Outside the gallery we see 'Blinc', a video showreel projected onto the gallery window. The images are many, moving constantly – they seem far from the stillness of the gallery and yet, they too seize moments of life and attempt to freeze them. From the raw observations of Simon Woolham's memories, unfolding through illustrated narrative, or Ellie Rees' whimsical exposition of popular culture, to the aesthetic elegance captured in Laresa Kosloff's shadowy cinematography and Ruth Lliffe's glinting bubbles that burst in and out of life on a whisper of air, these works penetrate a moment in time and hold the viewer within.

Blinc and '...But Still' mutually illuminate, holding the audience between choreographed stillness and inescapable flux; contrasting the indefinite with the finite, the fleeting with the infinite. The subtlety is perceptive, the under-statements effective. This show has something quiet to say and it says it so quickly and so quietly that it is disquieting.

INTERFACE

REVIEW

Blinc and ...But Still

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