Screenshots of Group on Facebook

Things to Come at Site Gallery

Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnston

From http://www.ellardjohnstone.com/assets/ThingstoCome.html

Things to Come
(UK 2011, 16mm, 6.00 mins.)
Things to Come is a 16mm film produced as part of a gallery exhibition at Site Gallery in Sheffield. Working from a series of unpublished photographs a large, highly abstract, metal and glass model based on Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s set designs of a ‘future city’ originally made for the 1936 science fiction film Things to Come was built in the gallery space. From this model the 16mm film was shot, imagining what an audience would have seen had the director, William Cameron Menzies, actually included Moholy-Nagy’s footage in the finished film. It was claimed, by Moholy-Nagy in Vision in Motion (1965), that these images, now lost, were “so rich a visual result that the editor of the film did not dare to use it”.

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The production photographs, held in the Moholy Nagy archive in Ann Arbor, show an extraordinary ad-hoc studio set–up, comprised of mirrors, scientific glass, polished steel, and string, framed within simple but fantastic contraptions of armatures, pulleys, fly wires and a-frames, that are used to manipulate them.

The film consists of abstract synchronised movement across and around the set, to create a dynamic play of light, shadow, reflection, parallax, depth, surface and prismatic special-effects made possible by Moholy-Nagy’s set. The film, shot in Black and White, is formed predominantly from extreme close-ups and abstract details. These are intercut with extracts from ‘set-piece’ takes, which occured in the gallery in way very similar to short performances. These takes, around the constructed set, draw on the intense choreographed activity suggested by the production stills.

After walking into Site Gallery, the made up studio spaces were full of mirrors, black cloth and carefully placed lights to show reflections of light. Ellard was taking photographs as I walked over to one of the tables and explained that the lights and mirrors made it look like a city. Yet the city looked quite scientific and space-age. The photographs that framed the walls around the table were all black and white and some were more effective than others in connoting the idea of a space-age city. Ellard explained that he used macro photography to make the viewer feel as though they were in the city itself, which sort of transports the viewer to another place. 

Artist and Piece Statement

Kris West

My art practice aims to highlight issues I come across within British culture and daily life, using humour as both an anchor and a uniting element for the viewer. Using the mediums of video, inks and photography, I make pieces that are aimed for a reaction. I combine my creative processes with current technologies, such as social networking and blogging to involve a mass audience to interact with my work.

For this exhibition I am going to turn mass media to my advantage. By making works that use subliminal messages and hidden jokes, I aim to challenge what others value about what society tells us about trade and consumerism. We as a people are subject to unrelenting advertising and messages of attainment and excess; leaving us as consumers, not human beings. I aim to expose this idea to the viewer and leave them questioning where they stand within this consumerist society. 

“Don’t Listen to the Girl in the Video” (2011)

5x 9” TV monitors, 5 x videos

Everyday the public is bombarded with adverts and messages of advertisement from the moment they wake until they moment they fall asleep. The unrelenting pressure to buy and conform to the consumerist society we live in has made us numb and docile in receiving this propaganda. “Don’t listen to the girl in the video” features multiple examples of advertising mixed in with personal vlog accounts about consumerism to highlight how “normal” it is to be hit with subliminal messages. The fast paced cuts and mix of sound show the unrelenting waves that hit each and evey one of us.