Mark Lewis was a photographer but he now works with film and creates video installation. He explores “duration” and “the “species present” (AA School of Architecture, 2017), i.e. the impossible to pin down in-between space ‘bookended’ (ibid) by past and future. Work has a temporal span but “do not expect action”. Talks about a tension between boredom and revelation.
He tends to strip film convention back to its most basic elements and avoids using audio because it is too powerful and emotive. (I avoided music in very first documentary/type moving image project for this very reason.)
Makes film installation specifically for the museum and not the cinema – short, exploring camera moves and taking them to their extremes. Long shot might go on for ten minutes.
Says art increasingly focusing on the quotidian – painting and photography went a very different way to the way cinema was going. (Asks why film went down the path it did… suggests there was no reason and it was a choice to become dramatic/theatrical.)
I really like how Mark Lewis describes his working process as ‘intuitive’. He takes pictures, pins them up on a wall and then if he’s lucky it might evolve into something a few months later. I suppose I recognised this in my own meanderings.
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