Graham Dolphin
New commission

UK, 2007, audio installation

‘There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.’
Alfred Hitchcock

Graham Dolphin lives and works in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Recent solo exhibitions of his work include: Repeater, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2007); 33 1/3, SEVENTEEN Gallery, London (2006); and Everything in Vogue, MIMA, Middlesbrough (2005). www.seventeengallery.com

The Magazine hosts a work specially commissioned for the festival. In response to this unique space, Graham Dolphin’s new audio work makes use of film soundtracks to build unrelenting suspense and tension in the darkened, secluded environment.

The viewer enters the Magazine through the back door, walking around the walled enclosure into the dark space. Inside, sounds drift through the space, a montage of elements from film soundtracks, each designed to create fear and anticipation, combining to generate a cinematic sense of unease. The score cuts before its climax, the music is a mix of anticipation only, the final murder or explosion removed. Without resolution to the built-up tension the music creates, the viewer is denied the final jolt or jump in their seats; instead the suspense continues to build and is never dissipated.

The work continues Dolphin’s interest in editing cultural material and his investigation into how music can be used as a cinematic device. This follows on from his dramatic work Condensed Vertigo shown at BALTIC in 2007, an audio work that filled the stairwell with swirling strings and brass from Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. Dolphin’s practice involves meticulous manipulation of the ready-made, in particular mass-produced and culturally loaded instruments. As Dolphin performs his intense acts of endurance, he defaces and destroys these objects as products, creating new things, each with another set of fetishes and another set of rules.