INSIDE/OUT Lecture Series - Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone

Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone have collaborated since 1993. Their early work took the form of large-scale immersive video installations, and interactive digital works. These were exhibited widely and were included in key exhibitions of the period – 'V-topia: visions of a virtual world’ curated by Steven Bode, Eddie Berg and Charles Esche at Tramway, Glasgow, 1994 and ‘Revue Virtuelle 12 - Les hypermédias' at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Since 2007 they have worked exclusively in 16mm film. By feeling their way in, using the camera as a resolutely analogue investigative tool, and through a very particular aesthetic of natural light effects, heightened colour, and close-up detail, the films immerse the viewer in a poetic and abstracted visual world.

Their work has been shown internationally, being included in group exhibitions at Photographer's Gallery, London, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Tate Liverpool; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Setouchi Triennale, Japan; Stroom Den Haag. Solo exhibitions include: John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Site Gallery, Sheffield; De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill; Satellite Gallery, Nagoya, Japan; Royal Academy, London. Film screenings include; Rotterdam International Film Festival, Oberhausen Film Festival; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Image Forum, Tokyo; London Film Festival; Tate Britain, London.

Ellard and Johnstone also write together, their book; ‘Anthony McCall; notebooks and conversations’ was published by Lund Humphries in association with Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland, in 2015. Stephen Johnstone is also the editor of The Everyday, Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Press, 2008).

The artists will be screening three of their 16mm films, on loan from LUX in London:

1. FOSSIL [2019, 16mm film, 14 mins, Silent B&W and colour [The film comes with 3 hand held coloured gels for projection]]

FOSSIL is a 16mm film shot over three years in the studios of the Royal Academy Schools London. The film explores the Royal Academy’s extraordinary collection of historic architectural casts, copies of antique columns, capitals and friezes, previously hidden behind temporary studio walls for 50 years. The film combines intense close-ups of the casts — optically prionted as negative sequences and hand coloured when projected — with verité style footage that records the precarious revealing of the casts and their ungainly demounting. Commissioned by Royal Academy Schools, Weston Studios.

https://lux.org.uk/work/fossil/

1. Things to Come [2011, 16mm film, 6 mins, Silent B&W]

Things to Come is a 16mm film produced as part of a gallery exhibition at Site Gallery in Sheffield. Working over a period of four weeks Ellard and Johnstone built a large, highly abstract, metal and glass model in the gallery space. The film consists of abstract synchronised movement across and around this model to create a dynamic play of light, shadow, reflection, parallax, depth, surface and prismatic special-effects. The film 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 a way very similar to short performances and suggest an intense choreographed but ad-hoc activity.

The model was based on a series of unpublished production photographs of László Moholy-Nagy’s ‘future city’ set designs, commissioned for the 1936 science fiction film Things to Come. The photographs show an extraordinary make-shift studio set–up, comprised of mirrors, scientific glass, polished steel and string. These objects appear to be suspended within simple but fantastic contraptions, armatures, pulleys, fly wires and a-frames, all of which are manipulated by a team of stage hands. The film sequence Moholy-Nagy produced from his model was never used in the finished film and is now lost. However, this footage has an almost mythological status because it was claimed to be “so rich a visual result that the editor did not dare use it”.

https://lux.org.uk/work/things-to-come/

1. Machine on Black Ground [2009, 15 mins, 16mm film, Sound Colour]

Machine on Black Ground fuses found early 60’s architectural documentary footage of the construction of Coventry Cathedral with our own recentlt filmed, optically printed and highly abstract colour field material (derived from shooting directly through or into modernist stained glass in The Meeting House at Sussex University and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin). Here we began filming from a point of view that imagined a fundamental relationship between the film frame and the individual block of stained glass, and as we did so developed an intuition that many modernist sacred spaces were built as giant light modulators or projectors of some kind. Concurrent with this is the suggestion that the occluded view through the intensely coloured and almost opaque beton glass stained window blocks is akin to a view through the porthole or a lens of a capsule (perhaps a film frame itself, perhaps a space craft or a submarine) into a dreamlike, subterranean or distant world. Like all of our recent work, this latest film emphasises the inherent colour values and texture of 16mm stock, so that the quality of film itself draws out the hallucinatory, time-capsule-like qualities of the spaces we have filmed.

https://lux.org.uk/work/machine-on-black-ground/

Host or Publisher Leeds Beckett University