Figuring
Landscapes
Figuring Landscapes is a remarkable collection of moving-image works
by 58 Australian and UK artists. The screenings focus on landscape
to address questions of ecological survival, post-industrialism,
gender, the touristic gaze, and uniquely in Australia, the status
of indigenous people in a post-colonial society. Recently shown
at Tate Modern, the first screening in the series will be introduced
by Figuring Landscapes curator Steven Ball (British Artists' Film
and Video Study Collection). This is the first in a series of events
to be presented by Mezzanine
01 Engagement (65 mins)
Tue 2nd June 7.30pm
A selection of films in which landscape is experienced as a spatial
encounter with specific places, journeying across distance and memory,
custom and industry, on land, on water and through the air. Amongst
the artists featured is Andrew Kötting who, with his folklorist's
ear for the humour of the vernacular, takes a boat upstream in Jaunt;
while in Petrolia Emily Richardson uses time lapse techniques to
look at the oil industry on the Scottish coast.
02 Encounter (60 mins)
Tue 9th June 7.30pm
The political and cultural engagement with place and being on the
land are unpacked and imaginatively reinvigorated in this screening.
The programme includes Ann Donnelly’s Political Landscape,
a video interpreting Northern Ireland’s conflicted landscape
from the perspective of personal family history, and Vernon Ah Kee’s
Cant Cant (Wegrewhere) in which the iconic surfing beach of white
mythology is reappropriated by Aborginal surfers.
03 Surroundings (70 mins)
Tue 16th June 7.30pm
This programme explores the ambiance of place as it resonates from
the broad scope of the horizon to the intimacy of the closely observed.
In Shaun Gladwell’s Approach to Mundi Mundi, the sublime immensity
of the Outback acts as the backdrop to a black-leather-clad biker.
In contrast Mike Marshall’s Days Like These is about the space
of an English garden.
04 Enactment (70 mins)
Tue 23rd June 7.30pm
Figures in the landscape: human presence writes and performs the
landscape as much as the landscape inscribes and enacts human presence.
In Margaret Tait’s Portrait of Ga, the fragmented impressions
of her mother (an elderly Orcadian) form a "film poem".
Australian artist Patricia Piccinini makes immersive computer-generated
environments which, in her film Sandman, creates a sense of terror
as a girl drifts in a tempestous ocean.
05 Anti-Terrain (120 mins)
Tue 30th June 7.30pm
Landscape is shaped by our relationship to it. Custodianship of
the land and its efficacy transcends a human lifetime. Esther Johnson's
Hinterland plays as a poem to the people who inhabit Europe’s
fastest eroding coastline. In Semiconductor’s All the Time
in the World, the siesmic activity beneath Northumbria is reanimated
to sculpt and bring to life the constantly shifting geography.
£3.00 or £12.00 for all five screenings
£12 full colour catalogue
For booking tel: 01453 751440
Stroud Valleys Artspace,
4 John Street, Stroud GL5 2HA
www.mezz.info
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