Frances Scott. Canweye { } / Jefford Horrigan / #75

About

This ambitious commission develops the artist’s interest in the apparatus of film within a three-part construction in Gallery 1. Here, different vantage points are offered on a new moving image work, filmed on 16mm in Essex and Venice.

This work develops out of Scott’s research around Derek Jarman’s Plague Street (1972), a drawing she speculates to be one of his set designs for Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) – a film that Jarman later captured on Super 8, directly from the screen at the Elgin Cinema, New York. His reconfigured version The Devils at the Elgin (1974), concludes in a “blizzard of ashes”, and presents the set as Jarman originally envisaged. This ‘ghost’ adaptation becomes an invisible score for ‘CANWEYE { }’, in which Scott sets out to interrogate the rich material that exists around the periphery of a cinematic production. In this way, she considers the film to be displaced across multiple sites and times.

The work appears to orbit another film, and acts as a document-fiction to this unmade epic. The film embraces the instabilities within both analogue and digital processes, and like the partial structure in the gallery, exposes the materials of its creation.

In ‘CANWEYE { }’, the image of the film ‘set’ – between states of construction and deconstruction – becomes the main character in a meta-fiction within the context of the Thames Estuary. Comprising sequences captured on Canvey Island, in Southend-on-Sea and Venice, Scott interweaves historical narratives emerging from archival material, with accounts of the elaborate practices of Victorian entrepreneur and property developer Fredrick Hester. In the early twentieth century, Hester mounted an ambitious proposal for a facsimile Venice to be built on Canvey Island, featuring its own Grand Canal and Essex Rialto Bridge. In this sense, the work is both local and de-localised, where architectural or geological sites signify another kind of ‘set’ or presentation in construction.

Forthcoming Offsite Project: Jefford Horrigan, 'Blue Gloves and Tigers'

More information will follow shortly.

'#75',
an exhibition of Focal Point Gallery's series of printed matter 2009-2016 are opening.

More information will follow shortly.