Portrait of the Artist by Proxy
Alison Jones: Portrait of the Artist by Proxy
If you could never see your own reflection again, would you trust others to describe your appearance? Alison Jones has done just that for DaDaVisions with Portrait of the Artist by Proxy. Originally commissioned as a sonic artwork by the Bluecoat in Liverpool, we recruited the talents of Sparkle Media to create a deliberately offbeat approach to standard subtitles. The end result maintains a key emphasis upon the audio emitted via the screen speaker system.
Alison Jones: Portrait of the Artist by Proxy
In this way the viewer/listener has to switch sensory emphasis just as Alison must as it is impossible to follow the descriptive portrait by reading the text alone. The point-of-view dips, spins and curls across a landscape of 3-D typography, lingering upon key words as multiple voices share consensus, or becoming impossible to scan as the soundscape dissolves into whispers.
Pixie Dust
Gina Czarnecki: Pixie Dust
Gina Czarnecki's films and installations are informed by human relationships to image, disease, evolution, genetic research and by advanced technologies of image production. Pixie Dust blurs contemporary methods in scientific research – specifically, limb regrowth in salamanders and the harvesting of embryonic stem cells from pigs for use in human medicine.
Gina Czarnecki: Pixie Dust
Taking the form of a scientific televised report, observers will be drawn by the implicit ambiguity that appears to suggest the future has already arrived. What if those missing limbs through birth or accident were able to regrow, augment and fine-tune their bodies… becoming super-able? A DaDaVisions commission.
Who Do You Think You Are?
So Many Excuses: Who Do You Think You Are?
...here comes DaDaVisions, a brace of opinionated new screen commissions developed right here in the North West and soon to appear upon TWENTY giant outdoor screens across the UK. Launching as a new strand of DaDaFest, four new artist film and video projects will face-slap shoppers with subversive and alternate interpretations of disability. I'll be posting further information upon each as the week progresses.
So Many Excuses: Who Do You Think You Are?
First up is influential agit-prop trio No Excuses, once fond of chaining themselves to buses to chant "Piss on Pity" and now reformed as So Many Excuses. Mandy Colleran, Mandy Redvers-Rowe and Ali Briggs (who some may recognise as Freda in Coronation Street) have revisited the classic Frost Report sketch from the 1960s featuring the Two Ronnies and John Cleese.
Then a comment upon the British class system but now playfully adapted to explore the stereotypes and labels that the disabled place upon each other, Who Do You Think You Are? is written and performed by SME, produced by Asta Films with vintage styling expertise by Maria Lloyd.
TV Interruptions
David Hall: TV Interruptions 1971
Video artist David Hall confusing the living hell out of the Scottish public during the 1971 Edinburgh Festivals with his seminal TV Interruptions series. Broadcast unannounced as part of domestic television schedules, those at home on the couch were suddenly faced with the perplexing sight of the goggle box slowing filling with water from a tap, ablaze in the middle of a field or switched to fast-forward in a communal viewing room to the sound of background screams...
David Hall: TV Interruptions 1971
In celebration we are showing these again on the Big Screen Edinburgh by kind permission of REWIND, a research and preservation project for early video art at the University of Dundee. Thanks are also due to Edinburgh Art Festival and curator Lucy Keany, for baffling a new generation of unwitting observers. Appearing daily from 5th August to 5th September, at purposely unknowable timings...
Embassy Screen
Beagles & Ramsay: When Humour Becomes Painful
The Edinburgh Annuale, now in its sixth year, is co-ordinated by the Embassy Gallery, currently housed within the Roxy Art House. The Annuale creates a loose association between artist-run activities extant in the city all year round, initially conceived of as a challenge to the multitude of high budget, high profile international biennials which fill the art calendar.
However unlike these biennials—which pay lip service to site specificity and inclusiveness while promoting broadly the same band of well-travelled artist—the Annuale swaps the role of international host by creating an alliance between the city’s artists who temporarily form a pact to raise their visibility and champion grass-roots operations.
Embassy Screen is an inaugural programme on the Big Screen Edinburgh of local artist moving image video work including that of Beagles and Ramsay, Alex Hetherington, Alan Holligan, Shona Macnaughton, Francesca Nobilucci, Ewan Sinclair, Emma Tolmie.
20th June – 5th July (daily, random intervals). Full screenings on 20th June / 1pm, 27th June / 2pm and 5th July / 7pm