Events

LUX Classics S01E01

7 April 2019
17:30

Eden Court, Inverness

Jayne Parker, 'The World Turned Upside Down', 2001. Courtesy of the artist and LUX.

LUX Scotland invites artists Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead (Thomson & Craighead) to curate a specially selected programme of work from the LUX collection.

LUX has existed since 2002 but traces its roots back to the London Film Makers’ Co-operative founded in 1966 and London Video Arts founded in 1976. The Lux Centre came in to being with the merger of these two organisations in the 1997. This happened to be just around the time that we were both graduating from art school in Dundee and so the LUX collection has been with us as a national resource for experimental film and video for about as long as we have been practicing as artists. As a playful homage to the collection, we wanted to create a programme with a particular significance to us – a selection of LUX Classics’, if you like.

For this screening, rather than attempt a comprehensive overview of the collection, we have focused on works that use structural, performative and technological conceits to help us reflect on our place in the world; whether it is clinging to a ball of rock hurtling through space in Tony Hill’s vertiginous Downside Up, or simply the unblinking eye of a film camera recording the filmmaker’s mother on Orkney in Margaret Tait’s touching A Portrait of Ga. Jayne Parker’s The World Turned Upside Down playfully reminds us that we are all part of the animal world and not apart from it, while John Smith’s The Girl Chewing Gumpokes fun at the artifice of cinema while alluding to more existential anxieties such as the validity of our own freewill. While Laure Prouvost’s Breugel Girlswas only made two years ago, we propose it as an instant classic’ which glories in being lost in translation reminding us how the cracks and fault lines between one thing and another is often where the most interesting things in life can be found.’

– Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead

Programme:

Tony Hill, Downside Up, 1984. SD video transferred from 16mm film, 17 minutes

Margaret Tait, A Portrait of Ga, 1952. SD video transferred from 16mm film, 5 minutes

Jayne Parker, The World Turned Upside Down, 2001. SD video transferred from 16mm film, 8 minutes

John Smith, The Girl Chewing Gum, 1976. HD video transferred from 16mm film, 12 minutes

Laure Prouvost, Bruegel Girls, 2017. HD video, 5 min, 25 sec

Programme duration: 48 min + introduction from Jon & Alison

Thomson & Craighead

Jon Thomson & Alison Craighead (Thomson & Craighead) make artworks that examine the changing socio-political structures of the Information Age. In particular they have been looking at how the digital world is ever more closely connected to the physical world becoming a geographical layer in our collective sensorium. Time is often treated with a sculptor’s mentality, as a pliable quantity that can be moulded and remodelled. Jon is Professor of Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art, University College London and Alison is Reader in Contemporary Art at University of Westminster and Lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths University of London. They live and work between London and Ross-shire.

Solo shows include The Academy of Saturn, Cooley Gallery, Portland, Oregon (2018); Wake me up when it’s over, Young Projects Gallery, Los Angeles (2017); Party Booby Trap, Carroll/​Fletcher, London (2016); Maps DNA and Spam, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, UK (2014). Recent group exhibitions include Trace Ingredients, Inverness Museum and Art Gallery (2019); I Was Raised On The Internet, MCA, Chicago (2018); Electronic Superhighway, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2016); and Art In The Age Of…Asymmetrical Warfare, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2015). www​.thomson​-craighead​.net