Cell Project Space

Natalie Dray @ Cell Project Space, Jan 29 – Mar 8

28 January 2015

Cell Project Space is bringing a new body of work by Natalie Dray to its London Space for the artist’s first solo commission for the gallery, titled Dray and running from January 29 to March 8.

London-based Dray’s self-titled show takes on modes of production, blurring the lines between art, commerce and manufacture. Having taught herself computer assembly, she uses automated reverse engineering to question the position of the artist and that of the machine in the contemporary world – and which is valued more, the human gesture or the functional superiority of the machine?

The style of the exhibition harkens back to minimalist art of the 60s, but instead of pop-arty shapes and figures are artworks that appear as appliances, “factory-made to fit the logical electrical requirements for the gallery”. The space itself becomes a kind of template for the exhibition with the “electrical functions of appliances synchronized and programmed, dictated by the capacity and availability of power in the room”.

Writer and poet Keston Sutherland has provided supporting text for the exhibition, and will perform a reading from his own selected works as part of a special event at the gallery on February 21.

See the Cell Project Space exhibition page for details. **

natalie

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Events + exhibitions, Jan 26 – Feb 1

26 January 2015

CTM and Transmediale 2015 kick off in Berlin this week, while Art Genève is also running in Geneva, and will include Arcadia Missa and Preteen Gallery as exhibitors with work by Amalia Ulman and Babak Ghazi; Phoebe Collings-James, Deanna Havas and Leslie Kulesh,  respectively.

Events in Berlin around CTM include performances by Evian Christ, Young Lean and 18+ (who are also doing a few dates across Europe), as well as a collaborative concert with Transmediale on the weekend. Sandy Brown is hosting its ☁︎ cave kino screening in the city outside of that, while in London Paul Kneale and Natalie Dray have solo openings, and Candice JacobsEXHALE  (to her earlier INHALE at Project/Number) is opening in Liverpool.

Elsewhere there’s another double-opening at Birsfelden’s SALTS, an exhibition in Reykjavík including work by Sæmundur Þór Helgason and another group show at Johannesburg’s The Goodman Gallery featuring work by Candice Brietz and Mikhael Subotzky among others.

There’s more so see below:

EVENTS

Transmediale 2015, Jan 28 – Feb 1

☁︎ cave kino @ Sandy Brown, Jan 28

18+ @ WesterLiefde/WesterUnie, Jan 29

Evian Christ, Suicideyear @ Berghain, Jan 29

Art Genève, Jan 29 – Feb 1

CTM & transmediale Collaborative Concert I @ HKW, Jan 30

(3rd) CONTACT @ Xperience, Jan 30

Open House @ Crown Building Studios, Jan 30

Rachel Rose @ V4ULT, Jan 30

Yung Lean & Sad Boys, 18+ @ YAAM Berlin, Jan 31

Paramount Ranch 2, Jan 31 – Feb 1

18+ @ V ARE, Feb 1

OPENINGS

Anne de Boer @ Desktop Residency, Jan 26 – Feb 14

Paul Kneale @ Evelyn Yard, Jan 27 – Feb 17

Yulan Grant @ Paradise Garage, Jan 28

Other People’s Memories @ The Goodman Gallery, Jan 28

Simon Davenport @ Trampoline, Jan 29

Laura Aldridge @ Tramway, Jan 29 – Mar 22

Julien Bismuth @ Galerie Emanuel Layr, Jan 29 – Mar 14

Natalie Dray @ Cell Project Space, Jan 29 – Mar 8

Lithium @ MilMa, Jan 30 – Feb 22

Candice Jacobs @ Cactus, Jan 30 – Feb 22

CLOSER SCRUB + STRÖME @ SALTS, Jan 31 – Mar 13

Yung Lean & Sad Boys, 18+ @ YAAM Berlin, Jan 31

#KOMASVO @ Listasafn ASÍ, Jan 31 – Mar 1

**

See here for exhibitions opening last week.

Header image: (3rd) CONTACT @ Xperience.

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Events + exhibitions, Jan 12 – 18

15 January 2015

The year’s barely begun and already there’s too much to cover so we’ve compiled a list of interesting events and exhibitions from across the internet for the week beginning January 12.

A few to pay special attention to is the two-day Ambiguity Symposium at London’s Slade, including talks from Chris Kraus, Rózsa Farkas and Hannah Black, a new collaborative exhibition, Spirit Level, by Jesse Darling and Takeshi Shiomitsu and the second instalment of French Riviera’s Alternative Equinox.

Chrystal Gallery and newscenario.net are featuring new exhibitions online, while Aude Pariset, Dora Budor and Deanna Havas have shows and events across Europe. Rosa Aiello and Kari Rittenbach will be reading in New York, while in Berlin V4ULT is presenting a new exhibition (with intervention) artist Philipp Timischl has a book presentation alongside a performance by Lonely Boys and Panke is presenting an exhibition of emerging Lithuanian artists for one night only in a Katja Novitskova-inspired show-title, Survival Guide.

There’s more so see below:

EVENTS

LA Art Book Fair, January 29 – February 1

VANITY FAIR | DEMO MODE @ Project Native Informant, Jan 14

Kate Sansom @ Chrystal Gallery, January 14 to January 15

Ambiguity Symposium @ Slade, January 14 t0 15

Lonely Boys + Philipp Timischl @ KM-Künstlerhaus, January 15

Deanna Havas & Tristan Gigon @ Marbiers 4, January 15

Towards Excomposition @ Skylab Gallery, January 16

Alternative Equinox Part 2 @ French Riviera, January 16

Vera Karlsson @ 3236rls, January 16

Rosa Aiello + Kari Rittenbach @ Triple Canopy, January 16

Window Leaks @ V4ULT, January 16

Survival Guide @ Panke Berlin, January 17

C R A S H newscenario.net, January 17

RCA Work-in-Progress show, January 16 to 18


OPENINGS

Harry Sanderson @ Cell Project Space, January 15 to 18

Chatrooms III: CLICK CLICK CLICK @ Grey Area, January 15

MINIBAR 6th SENSE, January 15 to February 7

Luke Gottelier + Fabio Marco Pirovino @ Ancient & Modern, January 15 to February 28

David Conroy @ Seventeen, January 15 to February 14

By Set Square, Compass and Eye @ South Kiosk, January 15 to February 14

DEAR LUXEMBOURG (YOURS BUCKTOOTHED GRL), January 15 to March 7

Anna Barham @ Galerie Nordenhake, Jan 15 – Feb 21

Aude Pariset @ Ginerva Gambino, January 15 to February 21

Heart breaking even @ HA HA Gallery, January 16 to 31

Always Brian (ti amo) @ 63rd – 77th STEPS, January 16 to 18

Joey Holder @ Project Native Informant, January 16 to 31

Jesse Darling + Takeshi Shiomitsu @ ANDOR, January 16 to 31

Dora Budor @ New Galerie, January 17 to February 28

Alex Bienstock + Jennyfer Haddad @ Welcome Screen, Jan 18 t0 Feb 15 **

Header image: Kate Samson: Nissan Yogurty (2015) @ Chrystal Gallery.

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Harry Sanderson @ Cell Project Space, Jan 15

13 January 2015

Cell Project Space is hosting an ongoing live screening of Harry Sanderson’s ‘We Are The Human Network (smoke rare-earth-petal)’ for one weekend only, beginning on January 15.

The event consists of a 3-channel video interwoven with matter and processes underpinning ‘καυστός’, a new series of “caustic light sculptures” in which software is used to form digital images from natural light, accompanied by sound used as a “sculptural element”.

This video installation functions much as Sanderson’s other work does, images produced and reproduced “in differing contexts, formats, and layers of detail until the images themselves start to function as a language of their own”. 

See the screening FB page for details. **

petal

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Reboot Horizon @ Cell Project Space, Nov 13 – Jan 11

11 November 2014

London’s Cell Project Space is following up its renovations with a new group show, titled Reboot Horizon, running from November 13 to January 11.

The group exhibition brings together the works of three different artists exploring the “increasingly conflated physical spaces of retail, business, and leisure” that have evolved from nature through corporate branding.

Santiago Taccetti‘s raw mountain fragments come not from the natural but from the digital, serving as a sort of “information compression of geological form”. Similarly, Alice Khalilova‘s work marries the virtual with the digital with her blend of Eastern philosophy and streamline technology, where the work of the third participating artist, Marte Eknæs, re-presents fragments of architecture and product design co-opted for corporate profit.

See the Cell Project Space exhibition page for details. **

Screen shot 2014-11-11 at 12.06.34 PM

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Yuri Pattison, Free Traveller (2014) exhibition photos

6 October 2014

No stranger to the peripatetic lifestyle, Dublin-born, London and Berlin-based artist Yuri Pattison brings his preoccupation with the internet and its physical effects into stark focus with commission and exhibition Free Traveller at London’s Cell Project Space, running September 17 to November 2.

Concentrated on the contextualisation of time and space through documentation, as well as the failed promise of an unregulated internet, the exhibition expresses an overspill of a now contained and corporatised online into real life, where movement is not only restricted to the texts and guides of reference materials but tethered to the grids and devices that have fully infiltrated modern living. That insidious integration comes in a row of identical IKEA VITTSJÖ shelving units bearing air mail packages, a bubble-wrapped photo of a building and screens projecting images embedded with images embedded with images of scenes from around the world, as ‘AIBO’ the robotic dog looks on, perched on a pile of travelogues.

In an interview with aqnb, Pattison expressed concern over the “ghettoising effect” of Google’s personalised algorithms and the streamlined searches they perpetuate. With Free Traveller the artist disrupts this process with a repurposed Google Mini server, stacked on a shelf and hosting a “bespoke rogue scraper site” at the Cell Project Space public IP address featuring a tab title that drolly pronounces “familiarity breeds contentment“. Utilising artificial intelligence, the indexing system searches the web for content relating to the themes of the exhibition – from an image of an NYC Rally to Save the Web to Easter Island’s “fascinating” moai statues – collating them via free association, rather than tying them to an experience and a perspective already understood. **

Exhibition photos, top-right.

Yuri Pattison’s Free Traveller solo exhibition is on at London’s Cell Project Space, running September 17 to November 2, 2014.

Header image: Yuri Pattison, Free Traveller (2014) @ Cell Project Space. Detail. Courtesy the gallery.

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Beatriz Olabarrieta @ Cell Project Space, Jul 24 – 27

16 July 2014

Cell Project Space is hosting a three-day interactive event celebrating the work of Beatriz Olabarrieta titled Shifty Show (While Undoing Shoelaces) that will run at their London space from July 24 to July 27.

The event comes as the closing of Olabarrieta’s month-long stay at the gallery, during which she was developing a presentation of new sculpture and video that comprises her Shifty Show exhibition.

Following a private viewing on July 24, the event will explore the inherent potential of raw materials removed from the functionality imposed on them.

The interactive space for Shifty Show will be developed in dialogue with writer and curator Ellen Mara De Wachter and her supporting exhibition text.

See the Cell Project Space event page for details. **

Screen shot 2014-07-16 at 12.49.35 PM

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Pre Owned: Looks Good Man @ Cell Project Space reviewed

26 March 2014

The web-browsing rabbit hole is hard to recreate in real space. Nevertheless, in his recent exhibition Pre Owned: Looks Good Man at Cell Project Space, curator Morgan Quaintance does an excellent job at simulating this experience. He imbues the space with a sense of disillusionment, impulse and humour, all the while maintaining an atmosphere of randomness in keeping with the spontaneous pop-ups and endless compulsion that comes along with surfing the WWW.

Cell Project Space, as a venue, works remarkably well with the concept of the exhibition. The Cell logo on the façade of the gallery is capitalised and vertically bisected like a ‘¢’, setting the visitor up for the themes of currency and transaction. The title of the show is derived from an eBay item lot that also served as the starting point: the curator’s personal trawling begun with a denim jacket, embellished with Nicholas Cage’s crudely painted features, on sale for $199.99 and described as “pre owned: ‘looks good man’”.

Pre-owned: Looks Good Man (2014) exhibtion view. Michael Smith, 'Secret Horror'  (1980). Tony Law, 'Strolling' (2012). Image courtesy Cell Project Space.
Pre Owned: Looks Good Man (2014) exhibition view. Michael Smith, ‘Secret Horror’ (1980). Tony Law, ‘Strolling’ (2012). Image courtesy Cell Project Space.

Another key theme of the show is appropriation and the ease in which material is transferred over the internet. Pre Owned includes looped videos of day time talk show host Kilroy, whose absurd and cringe-worthy show openers add a lightheartedness to the exhibition. The loop was stitched together by YouTube user JGM1138, who’s work is used without permission in the show.

In sourcing what at first resembles a dystopian marketplace, Quaintance walks the increasingly blurry line between collector, curator and auteur. Some of the materials gathered are presented in conjunction, not with artists but with cyber personas. The exhibition opens with a selection of Northern Soul patches (purchased in 2013) from eBay account holder Gary Eastwood. Drawing out a comparison with the objet trouvé and sound print, the adjacent wall showcases Slade graduate Aura Satz’s  Vision Score’ (2012), a perforated sheet designed for a mechanical piano but existing on the wall as a form of geometric abstraction.

Walking around the space the various works become more thematically intertwined with subtle wit and metaphor slowly emerging. John Lawrence’s ‘Carbon Copy’ (2012-ongoing) brings us Denzel Washington’s first and mostly forgotten movie of the same name. It’s a highly problematic 1981 culture-clash flick in which a young black Washington encounters his white father. Hijinks ensue.

‘Carbon Copy’ consists of three manipulated posters –each one purchased from an online source and then overlaid with a description of its condition. According to the press release, Washington was so embarrassed by the racial stereotyping in the movie that he tried to destroy every existing copy; Lawrence’s on-going project uses this internet folklore as inspiration for the series, intended to continually perpetuate the movie’s legacy. The web’s ability to remember is embraced, reminding us of pasts not easily destroyed, while the title plays subtly into the more contemporary web language of our day-to-day life (to ‘cc’ someone in email, after all, is a reference to a typewritten, carbon copied past).

Other included works provide visual allusions to a casual online trawl. Tony Law’sStrolling’ (2012), which gathers looped content of women walking aimlessly, provides a referent to the experience of casually glancing from one set of pixels to the next, observing links without entering. Paradoxically, strolling depicts an era where cell phones, MP3 players and portable devices didn’t exist; where we were less distracted on our daily walks.

Pre Owned examines online consumer transactions as an art in itself. In Quaintance’s words, “People are making work but [do] not want to identify it as such”. Stripped from their original context, the YouTube loops, posters and eBay-purchases take on a new life within the white cube. Such objects, acquired for currency through an online marketplace, become endless fodder for (re-)appropriation. The price paid and when they were bought neglected in order for the materials to become a new form of artistic currency.

Whether or not one agrees with this form of re-presentation, Pre Owned highlights the endless replication of visual imagery on the web. That JGM1138’s ripped YouTube video is used without credit also points to the rapidly depleting notion of copyright. Objects, although replete with their own historical narratives are used as visual material, like paint. Does having not purchased, assembled or asked permission to use Kilroy make its display more problematic than the Northern Soul patches? More importantly, what is the best form of crediting and compensation in the Web 2.0 age? The success of Pre Owned lies in the way the exhibition poses these questions, leaving the answers for us to find elsewhere. **

Pre Owned: Looks Good Man, curated by Morgan Quaintance is running at London’s Cell Project Space until April 27, 2014

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MSHR @ Cell Project Space, Feb 27

24 February 2014

A collaboration between Brenna Murphy and Birch Cooper, MSHR will be presenting their performance, Ceremonial Chamber, at London’s Cell Project Space, February 27.

Merging technology with the primal and intuitive aesthetics of folk art and spiritualism, the project engages its audience in improvised action, across hand-built electronic instruments and visual stimuli, to psychedelic effect.

MSHR have been working together, across electronic sound, organic material, light, and reflective surface, under the name since 2011, performing at Portland’s now defunct Appendix art space and working with art collective Oregon Painting Society. Murphy also produced a videogame as supplement to some MSHR tracks, InwardConchUpwardSpiral, which you can play and download here.

See the Cell Project Space website for details. **

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Adham Faramawy @ Cell Project Space reviewed

23 January 2014

‘All that glitters is not gold’. That’s a maxim that applies to RA graduate Adham Faramawy’s HYDRA exhibition in more ways than one. Offsetting the bright white walls of Cell Project Space is the garish future-present realities of bodies mediated through the screen. A multilevel stage-as-sculpture and its hueless fibreboard platform, lightly spray-painted with hazy circles of bright pinks, yellows and blues, is central to its exhibition namesake. ‘Hydra’ is listed in lower-case and bears a two-channel screen display to match its multiple titular meanings, across a many-headed mythological monster, a persistent and complex problem and the root of the word ‘hydrate’. Those screens feature two people, one a woman, the other a man, being flooded with the shimmering, realer than real, reproductions of water in ‘Vichy Shower’. That’s after being aptly greeted by the ‘Hi! I’m happy you’re here 1’ plaster sculpture, at eye level and featuring lumps of imitation gravel vainly spruced with shimmering silver spray paint, while crowned by a halo of LED lighting emanating from behind.

Header image: Adham Faramawy, HYDRA (Installation View). Image courtesy of Cell Projects.
Header image: Adham Faramawy, HYDRA (Installation View). Photo by Mariell Amelie. Image courtesy of Cell Projects.

There’s something incredibly hollow and unsettling about HYDRA, where an opening night audience hovers around the aforementioned centrepiece, with its reference to the “advanced skin care product” of the ‘Vichy Shower’ title, but no sign of the product itself, and its ubiquitous watery motif, less sodden and soggy than piled up with HD pixels. No one is wet and everyone stays thirsty as our male performer greedily chugs a bottle of water between CGI water bombings on one screen, his preening female counterpart sporting a T-Zone pore strip on her forehead, across the other. The two switch screens at intervals, never sharing the same space but occasionally overriding each other and reproducing themselves across both displays that are perceivably playing the same film. They almost synchronise at points but never quite do.

Where the two participants in ‘Vichy Shower’ are spared exposure below the bust, the grime-smeared bodies of three people writhing and wrestling among themselves and their mud masks in ‘Full Body Facial’ distort and deform under the gelatinous blob of liquid simulations, trailing and obscuring the movements of its captive performers. Locked in an endless loop of abject nudity, they end up suspended in their own simulation, while becoming fragmented into a mass of body parts. Dissected and divided across the rest of the exhibition, male anatomical elements are privileged in an exquisite corpse of a waist-level framed pelvis with semi-boner in ‘Neverwet (dreama)’ at one end, and an almost-full-bodied peek into the ablutions of a man in ‘Spa Day’ at another –the screen flipped vertically like the frame of an invasive smartphone. Everything is immersed in the viscous glue of something that’s presumably meant to resemble water, but looks more like an oil slick, or, if the innuendo of ‘Neverwet (dreama)’ is to be applied, a particular kind of bodily fluid.

Adham Faramawy, 'Full Body Facial' (2014). Video (5:18). Image courtesy of Cell Projects.
Adham Faramawy, ‘Full Body Facial’ (2014). Video (5:18). Photo by Mariell Amelie. Image courtesy of Cell Projects.

“Bodies flex, exhale and exfoliate,” says the blurb of the HYDRA leaflet, as if these behaviours, animal and advertised, are one and the same. Luxurious and unnatural, the omnipresent blob follows any attempt at getting clean in ‘Spa Day’, as the man, with his image cut off at the shins, wipes away a thick white foam from his skin only for a glistening CGI course to replace it. Focus on the phallus far outweighs its conventional opposite; there are no vagina close-ups and the only pair of boobs are unceremoniously thrust into the ‘Full Body Facial’ melee. It’s unclear whether the sexual disparity is intentional, as is the race and gender difference between the characters of ‘Vichy Shower’, but there’s something to be said for the disproportionately flaccid, synthetic, archetypically white masculinity of these scenes, and the concept of HYDRA in general.

There’s no denying the sense that the audience has entered an unnatural state, confined to its screens and the concrete reality of a modern-life construction. A powerful, fashionable, aesthetic and tactile fetish pervades, the irony of it being that none of it can be touched. Whether it’s the watery droplets gathered on the waxed and polished screen of ‘Vichy Shower’ –suspended in an abstract limbo of graphic simulation that neither viewer nor viewed can reach out and touch –or the phoney gravel sculptures that are tacitly off limits, HYDRA is the very realisation of the re-mediated unreality of a two-dimensional space.

Adham Faramawy, 'Neverwet (dreama)' (2013). Video (934). Image courtesy of Cell Projects.
Adham Faramawy, ‘Neverwet (dreama)’ (2013). Video (9:34). Photo by Mariell Amelie. Image courtesy of Cell Projects.

An unfulfilled desire and persistent thirst culminates in the composition of ‘Neverwet (dreama)’, its visuals not explicitly referencing but recalling the seedy self-indulgence of a superclub aesthetic, with whirling interior spotlights and a soundtrack that vacillates along the not-quite-stimulating-enough strangeness of computer-generated bass drops and syncopated drum beats. This is sexless, mechanical lounge music. Crumpled silver cellophane, hovering blocks of gradient colour and, of course, the persistent globules of make-believe water, disappear and dissolve into a weathered concrete surface in one video and the graphically reapplied rock formations of another. It’s hard to tell whether we’re watching ice melting away or water drying up. It’s probably, ominously, both. **

Adham Faramawy’s HYDRA runs at London’s Cell Project Space from January 16 to February 23, 2013

Header image: Adam Faramawy, ‘Vichy Shower’ (2014).Two-channel video. Photo by Mariell Amelie. Image courtesy of Cell Projects.

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An interview with Rachel Reupke

13 September 2013

In artist Rachel Reupke’s latest exhibition stills from fashion editorials come to life as moving images, romantic ideals sown by advertising execs are cut out and moments of awkwardness are played out in slow motion as various couples unsuccessfully loop over rounds of pints. Wine & Spirits, an exhibition at Cell Project Space, London is nothing if not a little dark, but that’s not to say you won’t find a little humour in the project too. Behind the close ups of cracked makeup and pints embarrassingly tipped over, there is a deliberate subversion of the language of cinematography: in the form of shots held far too long, that create laughable moments but also reveal the mechanisms that editors master to wipe out unattractive seconds of silence and create a seductive commercial through the use of software like Final Cut Pro.

A London-based artist, who began working with what she calls “indie-pop budget videos” before having screenings shown at Centre Georges Pompidou, Tate Modern and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Reupke has built her reputation on managing to cover a mix of issues from money to class, happiness to relaxation, by focusing her lens on the production of images for commercial use. In ‘10 Seconds or Greater’ (year) this resulted in the production of totally new stock footage, based on scenes with tag-lines that were sure to make a healthy profit such as: a young, well-dressed couple chopping up and cooking fresh vegetables with smiles on their faces. The aim is always to try to come close to examining how popular marketing defines social taste. As Reupke explains that so many of us have grown up so saturated in this media that we very often forget to question our daily interaction with the box-set or laptop screen at all and, even more importantly, the way in which the narrative of the content is placed before us.

In Wine & Spirits, these trendy couples playing out social conventions are replaced by an altogether more sober bunch –in spite of the abundance of alcohol being visibly consumed. In each scene, a woman and a man sit opposite each other in obvious disdain at their bleak surroundings, to represent a corner of a bar or pub. This representation, in the form of a 20-minute HD film, shows what it might be like to really get to know someone, a counter to dating shows on TV, which delete so many of the pauses in conversation and nerves that modern dating conventions entail. In the next room, 24 images of unbranded pint glasses titled “Nonic” are also to be found of rounds.  Drawn on PhotoShop they ultimately allude to the numbing effects of alcohol on our senses and in turn the deadness, or perhaps apathy, towards confronting popular media.

Firstly, I wanted to ask if you were to pitch Wine & Spirits as a programme to an actual TV executive what would you say its goal was?

Rachel Reupke: Well, I think in the first place the idea of it being a show is very different from the actual film. It doesn’t have the structure of a TV show. It’s more like a drama of some sort, so it would be a TV drama I suppose, a very boring TV drama about people meeting up for a drink.

One of the original BBC goals was to entertain, inform and educate. Would you say Wine & Spirits had any of those goals?

RR: To be frank, I think it fails on all those levels. If anything, it lends itself more to the time when they were commissioning fantastic experimental TV. It certainly doesn’t educate, and it barely entertains. I often use boredom as a humorous device though, for example, when a shot is held for way-way too long. There’s nothing interesting in that and there’s nothing entertaining but it’s that tipping point, when the audience becomes aware that something’s gone wrong with the film. For example, I used to love watching darts live late at night. There were always lots of times in the darts competition when nothing happened and you saw that the camera had suddenly settled on a rucksack under a chair. You knew there was no producer there watching what was being broadcast – and I think my film has a little of that quality to it.

Why did you choose to shoot your own footage instead of using stock footage from dating shows?

RR: The point is that I have control over the content of the shot; from who’s in it to what’s in it and even the composition. I just can’t get from used footage what I produce because there’s something about the way in which our actors are stiff in my work, even quite posed, that you don’t get in real footage. To be honest though, I wouldn’t say it’s really talking about the medium of TV that much. I just think we have all grown up so saturated in TV so I think our reading of film or moving image is so sophisticated, so that element inevitably seeps in but I’m not trying to critique TV but I wouldn’t make that claim. In terms of the quality of art direction and quality of image, yes, but I wouldn’t say its a critique or anything.

Who are the characters in this film?

RR: There are two. There is one man and one woman. It’s the same actors throughout but they’re not necessarily playing the same characters in each scene.

In one of the clips they look like they’re on a quite a high class night out, except for the fact that they’re drinking pints of Guinness…

RR: Each scene is based on a still image and that scene is based on a really old still for Guinness. I haven’t mentioned that because if you tag your references then people get waylaid by Guinness. You know, it’s not really about Guinness at all but I really liked the composition of this advert. It’s quite interesting because it’s a Guinness advert directed at women. I think it’s in the 50s when they were trying to get women to drink Guinness.

Rachel Reupke

That’s why the man is out of shot?

RR: Exactly, the focus is on the woman.

And so what other visual research did you do for the project? Was it mainly composed of advertising stills?

RR: Yes, print advertising rather than TV, just because I like to work from a still image and also editorial photography, commercial realms, a bit like the Sunday supplements; that lush photography of an editorial nature or advertising. And then one of them is actually my own composition.

Were you aiming to get still images that appealed to a certain type of woman or demographic –Sunday fashion magazine supplements are often aimed at a very certain type of woman.

RR: It’s a mixed vibe, a mixed message, I’m not pinning it down too much but it’s not even aspirational because some of the locations are quite abject. I think it’s fairly classless. Also, with the clothes, we were going for a real non-specific style, without era or type of person, so it is as neutral as is possible.

What about the lagers and the pint glasses… I read that you haven’t just included them in the film but that you’ve done drawings of them on PhotoShop?

RR: Yes there is a series of prints in the second room, 24 prints called ‘Nonic’, which are rounds of drinks, two or three pints or half-pints, and there is a wine glass in there somewhere. They’re not branded and they’re also a little old fashioned in that they don’t have individual shapes like the Stella [Artois] or Kronenberg glass. I’ve avoided all of those and gone for really classic pub glasses, so there’s no brands indicated. I suppose Guinness is the only thing that is unavoidably associated with itself because of the colour.

Why did you choose to draw them in PhotoShop?

RR: There’s something quite obsessive about these rounds of drinks and to take photographs of rounds of drinks means you’re kind of there or you collected the glasses together to make the shoot and there is some sort of sense of reality, an event, in the artwork. Whereas rendering them in PhotoShop is a bit day-dreamy but also obsessive, while being a little bit of a joke because there are 24 of them. And you ask, ‘why is this person drawing or rendering endless rounds of drink?’ There’s something about the boredom of drinking or the boredom of always going out to the pub, one round after the other. It’s endless, from the age where you get into the pub to death… It’s possibly a bit dark this work. It’s not celebratory.

What about the idea of romantic love and dating website algorithms, where do they inform this project?

RR: The whole internet dating thing is not really part of the work. I mean, I’m very happy for it to be written about in those terms but it’s not actually part of what I was thinking about with the relationships. In the film, they’re certainly not first dates. They’re people that are far more familiar with each other. It could be any point in the relationship. It’s very hard to define. They could be work colleagues going out for a drink, going from a friendship to trying something else, it could be the end of the relationship or it could even be an ex-boyfriend and girlfriend meeting up, any point, actually. But I guess what it isn’t, is a scenario where either of them are trying to impress the other. It’s gone beyond that point. You know they’ve definitely given up. **

Rachel Reupke’s Wine & Spirits is running at Cell Project Space until October 27, 2013. 

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