Exhibition

Garlands, Alex Hetherington & Janie Nicoll

9 Aug 2008 – 8 Sep 2008

Save Event: Garlands, Alex Hetherington & Janie Nicoll

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Mineral Park assembles multiple materials, narratives, video, sound, biography, music, performances and texts that play in and out of sequence and synchronization to generate multiple and differing, evolving experiences from the specifically chosen and researched materials. Alongside this Hetherington has selected a number of international video artists whose work corresponds in different ways to the materials and themes in the show: here he attempts to synchronize his practice to the work of other artists generating further alliances, sequences, disruptions, coincidences, abrasions. The show will be self-generating; the work will change and evolve independently during its installation. The materials used are: the biography of the twins Jennifer and June Gibbons, the notorious sisters who created a secret language and had a pact not to communicate with the outside world; performance footage re-enacting songs by the Cocteau Twins, a band from Grangemouth who achieved international success with their beautiful and ethereal songs, featuring the singer Elizabeth Fraser who created a difficult to understand language; video footage shot at the Grand Canyon and Mineral Park, a ghost town in Arizona, footage from Falkirk Cultural Center in San Rafael, California, the one time home of industrialist Robert Dollar; two high energy disco, acid house songs: Voodoo Ray (A Guy Called Gerald) and Let Me think About It (Ida Corr & Fedde Le Grand) and the description of a mid-air plane collision and the language psychology of why gay men speak with a sibilant S. Hetherington investigates the context of the ‘exhibition', ‘screening' and ‘group show' by juxtaposing different disparate materials over multiple screens over the duration of a regular feature film, 90 minutes. In addition the material includes works by a group of artists working with similar, contrasting or disruptive themes central to Hetherington's practice: the interrogation of the nature of pre-existing images, texts, films, performances and the context of the exhibition as well the tensions revealed in their reworking, their reorganisation, their presentation. Further themes include the nature of language, the construction of gender in cinema and theatre, and the synchronization of assembled materials: live and pre-recorded, improvised and immediate, past and present, incongruous and abrasive and the collage and re-enactment as embodiments of the ambiguities surrounding identity and the self-portrait. Anne Colvin's video loops deliver a mesmerizing take on reworked imagery. Re-animated clips coalesce with occasional sound along a carefully edited timeline creating an experience more akin to musical abstraction than a linear filmed narrative; her work “The Audition throws a scene from Godard's "Contempt" - one of those quintessential Nouvelle Vague films about film - into a monochromatic (red and black) dreamscape of movement and audio crescendo. The players are stuck in their bit part audition tirelessly waiting for rejection or inclusion.

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