'Free Radicals' 

Len Lye, Amy Granat, Anna Barham, Caroline Achaintre

Arcade presents the 4th and final exhibition in a series celebrating the work of New Zealand artist Len Lye (1901 – 1980). The exhibition takes its name from Lye’s 1958 film Free Radicals.

Free Radicals has been described by Lye’s biographer Roger Horrocks as “ a dance of natural energies”. Lye’s abstract imagery, made by scratching the filmstrip, is driven along by tribal drum music always maintaining a hot sense of physical intensity. Lines stretch, spin, wiggle, and sway, describing the intangible forces at play. It is these forces operating within the other works that form the premise of the exhibition.

Granat like Lye creates films and photographs without a camera; scratching, puncturing and assaulting the film material to exploit the basic qualities of light and movement. Anna Barham, who featured in the first incarnation of Free Radicals at Artnews Projects, Berlin, exhibits random flickers of light recalling the rhythms and variations of Lye’s particles in space. Caroline Achaintre’s new work, a zigzagging support carrying a fragile totem, recalls the warmth and tactility of Lye’s film and its soundtrack, a field recording of the Bagirmi Tribe of West and Central Africa.


http://arcadefinearts.com/currentexhibitio.html