Lost High Street

About

The Collective Gallery are delighted to present the first chance for Scottish audiences to experience a solo show by Paul Rooney. The exhibition comprises of two video pieces; Lost High Street (2008) and Monster (2004). Lost High Street is a new Collective Gallery commission, filmed in Edinburgh at the beginning of May 2008 on board an open top bus doing a tour of Edinburgh City Centre. Lost High Street takes the form of a VHS tourist video, circa 1987. The viewer sees the trip from the tourist's perspective, seated alone, at the back of an open-top bus. The tourist, voiced by the artist, Paul Rooney, is unsure of his own past life, mixing what he thinks are his own memories with misheard fragments of the tour guide's spiel. Not only this but the repeated monologue and whirling scenes of Edinburgh reveal that he is stuck forever on a tour that never stops. In the second of the two video works, Monster, a single male voice describes the experience of acute perception, poetically describing the experience of walking the streets of a city. This narrative is voiced over images of blurred reflections of people moving around the city of Melbourne, Australia.