10 DECEMBER 2015 – 16 JANUARY 2016
TINTYPE, LONDON
Private View: Wednesday, 9 December 2015, 6.00–8.30pm
Artists: Jordan Baseman, Helen Benigson, Sebastian Buerkner, Jem Cohen, Ruth Maclennan, Melanie Manchot, Uriel Orlow, John Smith
Essex Road II, the second edition of Tintype’s Essex Road Project, is comprised of eight specially commissioned short films by critically acclaimed artist-filmmakers, each inspired by the mile-long street situated in the borough of Islington, North London, from which the project takes its name, and where the gallery is also located.
Five minutes or less in length, the films are back-projected onto the gallery’s large window, and can be viewed from the street seven days a week between 4 and 11pm.
Says Tintype director, Teresa Grimes:
‘The pleasure of this project is knowing that what started as an idle thought – me staring out of our large window – has become this event that people remember and look forward to. And it has been an equal pleasure to work with eight exceptional artists, all of whom have produced films that are thought-provoking, beautiful, poetic and mesmerizing in equal measure.’
About the films:
Over the course of a week, Jordan Basemen walked up and down Essex Road at night with a 16mm camera, taking near random, long exposure shots. Each time he reached the end of the film, he rewound and filmed over what he had already recorded. His aim is to create a psychedelic portrait of the street at night, with multiple exposure visuals that collide, overlap, compliment and disturb one another.
Helen Benigson’s video is inspired by the hen parties that take place on Essex Road and thereabouts on Friday and Saturday nights. Using fast paced text, her film is a visceral celebration of this female ritual – carnivalesque, pulsating and anthropomorphic, referencing contemporary community, performance and what it means to share in the context of marriage and friendship. Benigson’s video attempts to arouse libidinal and corporeal concerns within a nightlife framework of body, city and space.
Based on the premise of a night bus journey down Essex Road, Sebastian Buerkner employs his innovative animation techniques, cutting-edge digital technology and abstract imagery to create a multi-layered interpretation of a real time situation.
Jem Cohen’s film responds to Essex Road built from street footage, portraits and sound recordings. He says: ‘I’ve come to feel that, especially in the city portraits, my role is a bit like that of an improvisational musician, with the camera as a kind of instrument and the world itself a series of forces to react to, but primarily from the gut and on the spur of the moment. The street should be a free space, belonging to everyone, where anything can happen, where everything isn’t controlled.’
Ruth Maclennan’s film starts with a portrayal of Essex Road as a meeting place where lives have landed, flourished and mixed with each other in wild, beautiful and unexpected ways. The film celebrates the collision of all kinds of lives on Essex Road—people, food (focusing on Zigni House, an Eritrean restaurant), nature (real, man-made and metaphorical) — and at the same time aims to bring out the contradictions, the ambivalent atomization and the hypocrisies of contemporary life in the city.
Filming in a continuous tracking shot going down Essex Road, Melanie Manchot invited a multitude of people living and working on or near the street to participate in this brief ‘performance’, which becomes a group portrait of the residents and shopkeepers on the street.
Playwright and author Joe Orton and actor, writer and collagist Kenneth Halliwell, Orton’s lover and eventual murderer, lived in Islington. The focus of Uriel Orlow’s film is Edna Walthorpe – Joe Orton’s fictional alter ego, conjured up by performance artists Adam Christensen and Marcia Farquhar. Orton used Edna’s letters to goad authority into revealing their own innate idiocy and double standards. Filmed on the doorstep of Joe Orton’s house, Edna’s letters to the Ritz Hotel, church halls and food companies feel oddly familiar and contemporary.
John Smith’s film revolves around the deliberate misuse of the Word Lens Translator app for smart phones. Interested in how this software interprets (and especially misinterprets) images incorporating text, particularly the coincidental meanings that come about through the mistranslation of the camera’s view, his piece for Tintype involved fixing his iPhone to the lens of his video camera and filming its screen as it attempted to translate a selection of shop signs, notices and street menus in the vicinity of the gallery. With the translation option set to translate from French to English the software became confused and tried to read English signs as French, as well as reading graphic architectural shapes as words.
TINTYPE
107 Essex Road, London N1 2SL
info@tintypegallery.com
tintypegallery.com
Opening hours
Wednesday – Saturday: 12pm – 6pm
and by appointment