It seems that more intimate, monitor-based screenings are the popular choice for Snöplog.
After making an appearance in the Private Cinema Installation at DFFUK in London this summer, Snöplog will be screened at FIVC, Festival Internacional de Videodanza de Chile, in Santiago de Chile, this November.
The film will be part of the FIVC OFF selection, shown as an installation in the Centro Cultural de España for the four days of the festival, 24-27 November 2015.
(Thank you Ryan M. McKelvey).
With one week to go until my first performance of Portrait, there is still much to do. I am working on honing the content/ movement material for the second part of the performance.
A preview of the work yesterday at a feedback session brought up some exciting and rich references, including Yvonne Rainer’s Hand Movie of 1966, and Kate Chopin’s novel, The Awakening.
One of the ideas that has created the form for the second part of the performance is the reflection that in our current lives we are constantly trying to get into screens – to become the image inside the device. I find it interesting that early on in its history – before its role as a PR tool was really discovered – the photograph was considered an objective document and was used ‘scientifically’ for categorisation and cataloguing. Now, whilst we talk about ‘documenting’ our lives and our work, it is almost as if we are in a state of constant becoming inside of our devices, rather than living outside them. Perhaps, in this second part of Portrait, I am inside the device, trying to find out its limits, as Ryan suggested “pressed against the inside of the celluloid.”
Which brought up Jenny Saville’s wonderful work…
And the idea of the camera as a lifeline, as in the film 127 Hours.
“Sculpting time”: is how Bill Viola defines his art. “Time is the basic material of film and video. The mechanics of it may be cameras, film stock, and tape, but what you are working with is time. You are creating events that are going to unfold, on some kind of rigid channel that is embodied in a strip of tape or celluloid, and that thing is coiled up as a potential experience to be unrolled. In a certain way it is like a scroll, which is one of the most ancient forms of visual communication.” ¹
This time is something Bill Viola likes to extend, repeat and decelerate — as if to show us all its contours, all its forms.
It is an aesthetic not unrelated to the practice of meditation, which focuses on the present moment, zeroing in on hte subject on order to perceive it more precisely. What can I see? For the artist, the camera is that second eye that “re-teaches us how to see” and addresses the world beyond, or beneath, appearances.
(my italics)
Jérôme Neutres in Bill Viola – Album Bilangue de L’Exposition au Grand Palais, Paris 2014
¹ “The Universe continues to be in the present tense,” in Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, writings 1973–1994, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995, p. 253.
What constitutes landscape as distinct from land. … In judging what is a ‘good view’ we are preferring one aspect of the countryside to another. We are selecting and editing, suppressing or subordinating some visual information in favour of promoting other features.
Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art
As Andrews implies, in constructing ‘landscape’ from land, we are framing, editing, just as the camera’s viewfinder frames and edits the information in front of it. Is it the very fact of framing the activity of moving flour around a surface and between two hands in the Snöplog video that creates the association with landscape? Is it also the tactile, natural character of the material that the hands manipulate?
What other associations does ‘landscape’ imply?
Andrews points out that in post-Renaissance Europe and America landscape
has fairly consistently stood for that ‘other’, the non-human world that is, or was, our home.
The idea of landscape therefore, has many associations, including an ideal place, purity, naivety and health. The ‘purity’ of the material in Snöplog is brought in direct interface with the social content of the piece – the fact of this pair of hands being a black and a white hand.
Other associations spring to mind, of work, of cultivation, of sculpting land, of ownership, of hierarchy. The juxtaposition of this simple human action with a material gathered from the land gives rise to many connotations to do with human activity and the land, the landscape and our place/s within it.
New to the world of blogging I have written a list of words that appear frequently on the first two pages I have created for my blog.
They are (in no particular order):
framing, juxtaposition, movement, performance, installation, film, extraordinary (and by implication its opposite, ordinary), functional, everyday, choreography, video, landscape
Might these be my keywords? My categories and tags?
KATY PENDLEBURY 
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