The Transition Gallery Prize is a contemporary art award that was set up this year. A solo exhibition at the gallery is awarded to a Chelsea BA graduate for outstanding work and Transition is pleased to announce that Paul Kindersley has won the inaugural show Kindersley's multifaceted work is situated in the cultural interface between viewer and film moment. Drawing on camp, nostalgia and the extremities of exploitation movies of the 60s and 70s, his starting references explore the exaggerated filmic concepts and emotions of tragedy, eroticism, melodrama, violence and the tacky.
His installations or 'sets' include constellations of found objects and images, arranged and filtered through convoluted and esoteric amalgams of histories and personal experiences. Large-scale photocopies and immediate environments of available objects act as clues in an unknowable hyper-drama. The objects function as 'props', which Kindersley also describes as 'gifts to the filmic moment'. She wanted his soul, but he could only give her his blood is a new work specially made for Transition. It references sexy 70s vampire movies in a form of shrine to stolen film memories and real life encounters with the cult Germen actor Udo Kier. In a charged environment formed from sounds, looks and props from Kier's films the viewer becomes the vampire with the film as the ultimately doomed, but struggling to keep alive, victim.
With his mise-en-scene facades into which the viewer is physically invited to enter, Kindersley strives to own and thereby validate the ethereal film experience, offering the viewer a degree of ownership of the romanticised glamour of cinema.
