Circumstances of Avertion

A couple of weeks ago there was a great show at Bristol Diving School by Robert Prideaux and Ruaidhri Ryan. The work mostly consisted of a large video installation, rather than having a stab at some inadequite wordliness.. there was an pretty interesting accompanying text by bristol based sculptor Charles Thorburn:

poster design by Lloyd Parker

The nature of the gaze is not a simple one. The world of moving image has developed countless methods of enticing us to fix ours for a few moments; to be informed, compelled, or entertained. In Circumstances of Avertion Robert Prideaux & Ruaidhri Ryan address the act of averting ones gaze, and how this is handled as a fundamental component of our experience of film and documentary.

We are often presented with documentary, and moments in cinema, that we are conditioned to accept as truth. David Attenborough doesn't just tell us what life is really like in the jungle, he shows us. Rather than setting out to interrogate their subject through this familiar mode of truth, in Circumstances of Avertion we see both Prideaux and Ryan use an intricate combination of fictitious, even satirical content intertwined with, for want of a better word, real moments. This duality of truth and fiction presents the viewer, at any  given moment, with a hyper real experience, because it is most like how we hold knowledge in our own minds.

Robert Prideaux is interested in landscape, particularly the topography of no mans land; sites between the city, countryside and the wilderness. Drawing from the experience of story telling in his recent works, Prideaux constructs a lucid narrative through subtitles and voiceovers. In his film The New Cut (2011) This narrative is informed by remnant accounts from the activity that occurred in the landscape. In a knowingly impossible task to draw from the murky history of this Bristol landmark a clear line of events, Prideaux draws from incomplete accounts, rumors, and his own intuition for a story that punctuates the prevailing effect of the visual in his work.

In contrast we see Ruaidhri Ryan's exploration of documentary film through an interview with Terence George James, in his piece Cut Away To A Seagull (2011). Combining this intimate dialogue with footage gathered from popular media forums, we see Ruaidhri take us past the bonus feature, and through a juxtaposition of bespoke HD film and YouTube clips to lovingly interrogate editing its self. Both artists have a playful approach to their practice, however Ryan introduces us to the "Inside gags" of the movie making world- frequented props, sound bits used time and time again; screen viewing screen

A staple of the show is the critique of dramatic device within moving image. Prideaux engages with imagery typical of romantic film and painting- Sweeping landscape, mist and meandering rivers. However we the viewer are being presented with a shifting truth; what appears to be mist is post trauma dust, a muddy embankment is a slag heap. Prideaux’s work is as much a real investigation into the nature of topography's and the activity that surrounds it, as a homage to Romance. These sublime, epic visuals comprised of industrial content using ad hock camera equipment are saturated with stories emanating from accounts, distorted or almost lost over time. It is these stories in fact that are the pathetic fallacy, as the landscapes themselves are far more solid, far more the driving force that carries the viewer on through the piece. The stories shed their classical narrative bonds, becoming more a method presenting editing centre stage.

Ryan, however, uses far more specific devices- personification features in his film  Cut Away To A Seagull (2011), present a creature that develops from the noble protagonist taken from a popular philosophical novel, to the misfit and ultimately becomes the but of the joke. From scene to scene, Ryan questions the effortless transition that the cut away provides, and the power such editing devices can have over the shape of a story. Continuity Error (2011) explores a commonplace background occurrence in film, in which a seamless tracking shot transforms a mobile ringtone into the unlikely star of the show.

The character of a city, and the signifiers we naturally associate it, are regularly exploited to construct the audiences understanding of a persona. It is these ambient structures, which permit social exchanges, that provide the textures and sensations that embody an induced experience of a city. The experience of film lifts us to reconnect with these things whether one has been there or not; the buildings, streets and night clubs of Sex & the City impress upon us our prevailing experience of New York.

Although they are in fact practical entities, there remains a cinematically iconic quality to the objects adopted by both artists. For example, in Ryan’s film The Making Of... (2011) we see train tracks feature as the catalyst for a wondering dialogue and a revision of a personally nostalgic location. It is the exploration of such structures, which facilitate our daily activity, that Ryan’s work engages with. This provides the viewer with time to experience moments, with these editorial props, as something more than a device of transition.

In this exhibition the aversion of one’s gaze, whether through a departure to a far away landscape, or an obligatory cut away, they are undertaken as an inevitability of film. However the work displayed in Circumstances of Avertion grapples with  the  paradoxical affair of these generally unregistered moments, moments that guide our glance from one thing to another, the moments that construct our vision.

text from exhibition catalogue, written by Charles Thorburn