Elizabeth McAlpine uses found film footage in an attempt to reveal and de-mystify cinematic structures. A geologist and grammatologist of film, McAlpine plays with the perceived narrative of mainstream cinema.
McAlpine will show new photographic work that use hundreds of film stills to create cinematic 'paintings'.
Film stills of actors caught in a moment of blinking have been collected and composed in a format that references the canonic paintings, 'Broadway Boogie Woogie' by Piet Mondrian and Frank Stella's 'Hyena Stomp'.
The dichotomy between the restless motion of film and the strictures of the cinematic medium parallels the fluid and recti-linear structure of these paintings' surfaces, that sought to represent the dynamism and architecture of urban activity.
Images of actors with closed eyes are the most still, silent extractions from a film, giving the work a muted character that is offset by the use of colour.
McAlpine's work continues to explore the in-between realm of silence and noise, motion and immobility that is a defining quality of cinema. To look at the captured images of 'blind' actors in these compositions, dislocated from their original material, reveals to the viewer the manipulative, seductive nature of cinema.
Laura Bartlett Gallery
22 Leathermarket Street, SE1 3HN
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