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Roderick Buchanan, Smith/Stewart, Jayne Parker, George Barber, Michael Curran, Jane & Louise Wilson, Breda Beban & Hrvoje Horvatic, John Wood & Paul Harrison, Gillian Dyson, Monika Oechsler, Alan Currall, Isaac Julien, Dryden Goodwin and Graham Wood.
'Unlimited Edition' is a collection of artists' film and video works from the last six years, almost all of which started out as commissions by Film and Video Umbrella. Although it features pieces by many of the most prominent and influential artists working in Britain over the last decade, the programme is not intended to act as historical survey of contemporary artists' practice, but rather offers a kind of snapshot of some of the tendencies and preoccupations that have surfaced within artists' film and video during that time.
Almost all of the featured pieces were originally commissioned for previous Film and Video Umbrella touring programmes. The works by Smith/Stewart, Gillian Dyson and Michael Curran, for example, first appeared in a cluster of programmes and small-scale exhibitions ('Instant', 'Fresh', 'Black Box', 'No Pain, No Gain', 'Take Two') that Film and Video Umbrella compiled and curated in the latter half of the Nineties to chart the remarkable resurgence of interest in performance-based or body-centred video work. Although many of these tapes have strong echoes of conceptual and performance pieces from the Seventies by artists like Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman and Marina Abramovic, they reflect how today's generation of artists have tended to favour a much more abbreviated, high-impact form, often drawing pieces to a close with a dramatic or theatrical twist. The short works by Wood & Harrison, Roderick Buchanan and Alan Currall, for example, use humour, immediacy and an eye for the quirks and absurdities of everyday experience that follows the example of another primary influence from the Seventies, the artist and photographer, William Wegman.
As well as stand-out pieces from previous touring programmes, the selection features brand-new works specially commissioned for 'Unlimited Edition'. Of these, the two pieces by the acclaimed artist film-makers Isaac Julien and Jayne Parker extend the theme of performance to a more staged and choreographed setting by incorporating elements of contemporary classical music and modern dance. 'Vagabondia', a single-screen version of a split-screen projection work commissioned last year, brims with Julien's distinctive finesse and visual flair, while '59 1/2 Seconds', an addition to a series of recent Umbrella-commissioned gallery projection pieces, showcases the striking rigour and invention Parker brings to her film works.
Two further commissions for the programme provide a similar interesting counterpoint. George Barber's elliptical and amusing 'River Sky' takes some of the conventions of the fly-on-the-wall documentary interview in a distinctly off-the-wall direction, while Dryden Goodwin's 'Closer' uses the imagery of modern surveillance camera technology as highly evocative material for a series of intimate and arresting portraits of unsuspecting bystanders. Its mix of affecting everyday minutiae and atmospheric, poetic observation is continued, in very different ways, in Breda Beban & Hrvoje Horvatic's haunting micro-narrative 'Irina is Not Herself Any More', Graham Wood's beguiling 'Lament' and Jane and Louise Wilson's unsettling 'Home/Office'.Roderick Buchanan, Smith/Stewart, Jayne Parker, George Barber, Michael Curran, Jane & Louise Wilson, Breda Beban & Hrvoje Horvatic, John Wood & Paul Harrison, Gillian Dyson, Monika Oechsler, Alan Currall, Isaac Julien, Dryden Goodwin and Graham Wood.
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