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Danielle Arnaud: Nicky Coutts: The Discovery of Slowness - 22 Feb 2008 to 30 Mar 2008 Current Exhibition |
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Nicky Coutts, The Discovery of Slowness
(An Attempt at Drowning and An Attempt at Disappearance) 2007 video |
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Nicky Coutts uses imagery that might be recognised from elsewhere. She appropriates paintings, photographs, objects and stories, some that are easy to recognise, with others lodged more deeply in our collective memory. These borrowed forms are then altered in some way and returned, often seamlessly, to impersonate what they replace. Currently, Coutts is interested in how we visit places for the first time often having heard tell of them, and seen imagery representing them, in advance. Second hand experience can become the gauze through which firsthand experience is possible. This was reflected in work made during a recent English Heritage Fellowship in Berwick upon Tweed, a coastal town in the UK on the border between England and Scotland. She began by constructing a 10 minute film Keep (2007) entirely from feature film footage that used the locality as a setting, centring on the iconic coastal castles of Bamburgh and Lindisfarne. Excerpts from Jean Vadim�s One More Kiss (1999), Roman Polanski�s Cul-De-Sac (1966), Ken Russell�s The Devils (1970) and Derek Jarman�s The Tempest (amongst others) were edited together so that the characters from the different films appear to talk to each other forming a narrative within a single location. This approach of looking through fiction in order to represent an experience of a place, evolved through reading The Discovery of Slowness by the German writer Sten Nadolny. It is a fictional account, rooted in some fact, of the life of John Franklin who died trying to find the North West Passage through the Arctic ice. As though using the traditional story of an explorer as cover, Nadolny lodges within it what appears his real interest, Franklin�s troubled navigation of social situations, his difficulties with the speed of communication, perhaps the burden of an undiscovered condition we might now call Autism. As Nadolny immerses one story of travel in another, Coutts disguises imagery within imagery, an existing story within a contemporary experience. The two video pieces that share Nadolny�s title The Discovery of Slowness: An Attempt at Drowning and An Attempt at Disappearance 2007, show a man, made from sand, forming on the shoreline. As in E.T.A. Hoffman�s story The Sandman, in Coutts�s video there is ambiguity over from whose perspective the tale is being told, which elements are real and which are fabricated and consequently where this character is to be located in time and space. The film footage is shown in reverse, so that what was being swept away by the tide is in fact returning, perhaps suggesting that no matter how much the stranger amongst, or within us, is erased he will be arriving anew in some other coordinate. A third video made in Berwick The Empire of Lights is named after Ren� Magritte�s series of paintings of the same title. As Magritte combined night and day in a single description, Coutts combines dawn and dusk using the moving image. The setting is Floors Castle in the Scottish Borders, which allegedly has 365 windows, one for every day of the year. In Coutts�s film two unseen participants plot their passage through the castle�s many rooms turning on all of the lights one by one as darkness falls while dawn improbably rises in the sky behind. As with The Discovery of Slowness, the viewer is presented with a version of real time, where it becomes difficult to see change as it is happening. Instead it is only available in retrospect, after the viewer has looked away and then returned. Coutts will also present Estates, a series of photographs based on 17th century drawings and paintings of stately homes originally commissioned to show them to their most opulent advantage. Each original is digitally manipulated to look like a tower by copying and repeating the floors and placing them one above the other. Recent shows include North and South, National commissions for the Millais Gallery, Southampton and the National Glass Centre, Sunderland, (July 2007). The Discovery of Slowness was originally shown in the Berwick Gymnasium Gallery (Aug 2007). The artist will take part in the inaugural biennial of contemporary art at Tatton Park, Cheshire which opens in May 2008. She is a Fine Art Fellow at Middlsesex University and a visiting lecturer at The Royal College of Art, London. Next: Suky Best & Rory Hamilton - Rodeo, new animation 11 April - 11 May 2008 Also showing: David Cotterrell: Eastern Standards, Western Artists in China, MASS MoCA, North Adams, USA - until 31 December 2008 Oona Grimes and Sophie Lascelles: Hidden Narratives, Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield - until 19 April 2008 Sophie Lascelles: Jerwood Contemporary Painters, Jerwood Space, London - 9 April to 18 May 2008 Heather & Ivan Morison: Untamed Paradises, MARCO, Vigo, Spain - 7 March to 18 May 2008 touring to Sevilla, June to September 2008 Marie-France & Patricia Martin: A mort l'Amore! performance at La Bellone maison du spectacle, Brussels - 14 February 2008 |
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