Elizabeth McAlpine

LIGHT READING: 1500 Cinematic Explosions

UK, 2005, video, 1 min
Courtesy: Laura Bartlett Gallery

LIGHT READING: Californian Sunset

UK, 2007, 16mm, 6 min
Courtesy: Laura Bartlett Gallery

Elizabeth McAlpine completed a BA in Fine Art and Critical Theory at Goldsmiths College in 1996 and graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2002. She works with time-based media and often uses film in her artwork. Her work has been shown widely throughout the UK, including solo shows at Laura Bartlett Gallery in 2005 and 2006 and Spacex Gallery in 2007. She has taken part in a number of film festivals and group shows in the UK and Europe including: A Certain Tendency in Representation, Thomas Dane, London; The Air is Wet with Sound, Rekord, Oslo; and I Love Cinema & Cinema Loves Me, Camden Arts Centre, London. www.laurabartlettgallery.com

Elizabeth McAlpine works mainly with time-based media, describing her working practice as being close to geology. She tracks the repetitions and gestures inherent in popular media, extracting pieces of found material from its archive and repositioning them in ways that reveal patterns and associations previously unconsidered. Her moving-image work attempts to reveal and demystify cinematic structures.

The works LIGHT READING: 1500 Cinematic Explosions and LIGHT READING: Californian Sunset are the first two in an ongoing series of films that juxtapose monitors and projections to create a landscape of minimalist films made from found Hollywood film footage.

LIGHT READING: 1500 Cinematic Explosions is created from the whitest frames from explosion scenes in action movies. These have been compiled to make a hectic, minute-long, white flickering film with agitated noise soundtrack. The sequence is like a moving minimalist painting, changing through slight variations in tone. In its intensity the work echoes the dramatic peak in a movie when the full screen achieves total white-out; here the preceding dramatic tension and narrative is removed.

LIGHT READING: Californian Sunset is composed of monochrome film frames taken from 35mm film trailers, using frames from the end of trailers as well as the single colour ‘flash frames’ that are often found between the graphics sequences or used as a system of editing. The frames have been arranged sequentially to start with the whitest, moving through the colour spectrum from light to dark, to create a hypnotic oscillating sunset. The original soundtrack is kept with each frame. The festival premieres a new 16mm version of the work.