One of my Pic London collaborators told me about James Richards:
From the Tate site:
“Richards generates meaning through abundance, by way of allusion, ellipsis and unity of tone, the lack of legibility counterbalanced by a strong sense of mood. The White Review”
Richard’s work will be really useful for me as he’s doing the same sort of thing – improvising, mixing, creating audio-visual collages. Here are some of the key phrases which stuck out for me from his Tate SHots interview:
- The material… none of it is abstract… it is all stuff from the world… continuously gather and experiment
- sound can enforce or go against an image
In the film below the time-lapsed Lillies are filmed in front of a painting that has a slight cartoon quality to it – of a wolf and bloody sheep, creating a ‘moving image still life‘ with death and gore in the Lillies as we watch them open and wilt, and in the painting that surrounds them. Death, dying, life, living, beauty, terror, sex all in this tightly compacted text. Content becomes abstracted by the close-up crop. Good for me to see how he relies on others to edit and animate. This later work has more of a polished feel and although I’m beginning to feel that the Brechtian/Deren habit of opting for less polished settings is not fashionable at the moment – I think my heart still resides more with a raw and under-commodified aesthetic.
SJField - OCA Level Three Study Blog 