Surroundings 

two screen video and sound installation (looped)  2007

Surroundings was the result of a two month residency at Knaresborough Castle during August and September 2007.  Surroundings was shown at the Mercer Art Gallery, February to April 2008, as well as  6 short silent single screen videos and a site-specific sound installation which took place for a week in the dungeon at the Castle in March 2008.  The two screen piece is in part an exploration of spectatorship – presence, absence and temporality.  The screens fill two opposite walls of the gallery and are segmented pans of the Castle walls, moving continuously.     The viewer cannot see both screens at once, but has to turn to see one or the other.  To the screen without people in, the viewer is both included and excluded by this lack of people, the only one in this depopulated world;  in contrast to the one with people in, where they take the position of observer.  The temporal dislocations heighten the experience of where the viewer is located in relation to the work.  The cuts are not ‘perfect’ (sometimes the camera is a little higher or slightly faster than the previous segment), revealing the human hand behind the camera.  Surroundings examines presence through a segmented temporality at the same time as an unfolding one.

Surroundings twin screen version extract

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Surroundings - site-specific sound installation (looped)

The dungeon at Knaresborough Castle is a stone room with no windows and has its own particular acoustic quality.  Four speakers, each with a different channel of sound constructs a soundscape that alters as you move around, bringing the landscape inside.

 

 

TEXT:     Surroundings in Context by Rob Gawthrop (written for the Mercer Art Gallery show)

A romantic view of the English landscape emerged during the eighteenth century, in contrast to the effects of the industrial revolution.  The land-owning aristocracy commissioned artists influenced by Renaissance ideas of Arcadia to make paintings of their land that constructed a view of nature that aspired towards the spiritual and noble.  The influence of this tradition continues today and is expressed widely in cinema, advertising and tourism.

Since the rise of conceptual art in the 1960s, artists have engaged less with the making of aestheticised objects and more with exploring phenomena and the politics of representation.  To this effect, many artists have used film, video and sound to explore both the materiality of the medium and its relationship with depicted subject matter.

Jo Millett’s work is concerned directly with perceptible experience; investigating the relationship between what is seen and heard, how it is represented and the experience of the viewer/listener.  The video installation Surroundings features two opposite projections consisting of repeated panning shots taken over a period of months.  Wipes between similar shots from different times are used both to conceal and to reveal the activities of people on one screen and their exclusion or absence on the other.  In Six Short Pieces, features such as trees and water become disconnected from their context and appear abstracted or take on unfamiliar qualities.

Surroundings demonstrates that aesthetic and perceptual engagement can take place effectively without resort to pictorialism or literalism.  This is an affirmative but critical approach to landscape as both a place of beauty and as a material construct.

Rob Gawthrop 2007