Kate Davis: Your Body is a Battleground Still (photographs 1-13), 2007

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed”

‘Goodbye To Berlin’, Christopher Isherwood, 1939

I am a Camera brings together a range of artists who transform the ordinary through the act of film making to radical effect. The exhibition juxtaposes historic works alongside contemporary artist’s use of the medium. In Steina & Woody Vasulka’s Home (1973) mundane domestic still lifes are transformed through the inner dynamic of electronic image processing. Craig Mulholland also uses image processing, combining it with stop frame devices, enabling him to animate static elements within his progressive virtual tableaux’s. Len Lye’s Free Radicals (1958, revised in 1979) uses direct animation to etch and draw directly onto the film allowing the resulting line to wiggle and weave to the musical score. Kate Davis also uses the line in her first film, Disgrace (2008). In it she maps her own body in pencil over a Modigliani drawing building into a confused crescendo, echoed through the accompanying soundtrack. John Latham’s Speak (1962) is a seminal and excellent example of animated abstraction which sits beautifully alongside the kaleidoscopic animations of Katy Dove.

With thanks to Mike Sperlinger at LUX, London and Tramway. (Please note there will be no preview but the film screenings will open on the 5th of June and will be open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am-5pm thereafter)