Video Projection Film

Most of them do not usually work in video or projection but use these media to accentuate prevalent ideas in their work.

Dorothy Cross’ work can be characterised by a desire to confuse and confront accepted notions of power, comfort and succour, by combining the natural with the artificial. She often incorporates treasured and intimate objects into her work, seeking to challenge the familiar, even sentimental meanings attached to them. In her video loop, Teacup, she combines the image of a delicate china teacup and an extract from Robert Flaherty’s film Man of Aran, the famous Irish documentary of life on the Aran Islands off the west cost of Ireland. By merging the two, the video loop explores the idiomatic and paradoxical notion of a storm in a teacup.

The majority of Tacita Dean’s work is made on 16mm film and How to Put a Boat in a Bottle is the only video that she has made to date. It was originally made to accompany her film, Girl Stowaway, in an installation made in 1995. It shows the process of putting a model of the Herzogin Cecilie into a bottle, resurrecting the destroyed ship and capturing maritime space – like a still – in the vacuum of the bottle. In contrast to the film, the video has a deliberate domestic feel and points to the difference between ‘fictional’ and ‘real’ time as well as the difference in image, process, content and structure.

Much of Cornelia Parker’s work draws a parallel between the micro and the macro world. In Projection she is playing with the idea of making a tiny piece of forensic information, in this case a feather from Freud’s pillow, stretch across a whole room. The actual feather is trapped in a glass slide and transformed by anamorphic projection. By adjusting the projector, the light can be refracted around the object rather than projected through it so that the viewer can inhabit the projection space and see every detail of the tiny specimen. A feather from a pillow (particularly Freud’s pillow) can have connotations of dreaming or of the subconscious – through projection it becomes a projectile.

Jaki Irvine’s Eyelashes is a single screen video projection, shot on Super-8 film and later transferred to video. The footage is of a man and a woman having a conversation over breakfast. In the accompanying voice-over, a woman speaks about a man who is having difficulty with some eyelashes..‘They just hang around her eyes in an anonymous casual kind of way that makes him uneasy...' The woman on the screen moves her fingers, glances at the camera, smiles at the man who tries to convince her of something. The narrated story becomes increasingly convoluted as the man on screen smiles, licks his lips, rubs his eyes and talks, to the accompaniment of Thomas Oboe Lee’s Morango, almost a Tango... ‘After a while it becomes clear that those eyelashes are holding his imagination hostage...’